The Song of Other Things
This article is about “emptiness” in a general sense.
Baffler Archives: Poems
Columns
Tongue Delirium
The world’s fats & wild offerings!
Radial exhalations, shadow & silk!
All that rushes through your twinned
globes, heating the irises.
Keep every phoneme
fungible, without weight.
Swimming field, no anchor.
Let your cries move
as thunder ...
Top Ten Reasons to Dislike List Poems
Feels like a grocery list.
Too many nuts can mess with your tummy.
Cutting out syntax from a piece is cutting off its ability to breathe in time.
Grind Culture.
There was once a child who tried to list everything he saw throughout the day,
Parsnips, milk (2%), sushi rice, ...
Self vs Rogue Island
Put your hands up, says the island. I look around but it is still just me and the island. I meekly raise my hands a little, slightly higher than before—is that enough? All the way up, you little nitwit. This foul-mouthed island is nothing like the ones in the ads. It’s also ...
Glass Octopus
the mesopelagic touches the underside
of a boat my father dreamed he built
I turned his fortune
into a sturdy vessel
that churned through countless waves
to the place where everything is equidistant
then in the chamber
of a lowered diving bell
through thick glass suddenly ...
Poem
Light burns the books of light.
They hang a black wreath on
the page, a door snowed shut.
Stars spaced like cries at night,
the words of wind in fire’s ink,
fill up the lungs’ black skies.
Eyes in the words shine back.
The voice in letters like light
in an ...
Auto Icon
“My body I give to my dear friend Doctor Southwood Smith to be disposed of in a manner hereinafter mentioned . . .”
—from the will of Jeremy Bentham, 30th of May, 1832
Sam, I am in a box
watching the centuries pass.
There’s a round object on the floor
between my ...
Mouse Song
After the dream of a white bed topped with a pool of water,
where in that dream I took photos of the white bed & the water,
look at the crushed flowers afloat in the water . . .
that same night I dreamt I was a child again, I threw a fit, I
rolled on the carpet of the ...
Fatigue Performance
Music held the
middle part of
summer
as she jump-roped the
rain out of the sky.
We watched from the car,
windows all the way down,
the clouds serious,
maybe even a bit severe.
The air may be a risk
for some people, the radio repeated.
The air ...
From Opera Fever
Darling, it was a single, unsmashed fish tank..
Well, it had the same effect as a lip scar..
Anyway, his voice was like four brandies in the tropics
I was on my best behavior that autumn…
A poem was pawing at the door..
Take a Picture It’ll Last Longer
The old world is dying and the new world
is actually also concurrently dying; it’s not
a good time. I heard they were able
to laser off your tattoo
of a ten-point spread; was there any discussion
of keeping it and lasering you off
instead? I’m just checking. I’m just ...
In which the morning after, a boy’s body had been dismembered
To God who made me, the clouds move toward us on that field.
It has just rained & the street is flooded again.
A boy whose face I do not remember has been dancing in
the rain & has now caught a cold.
We gather around him as good friends do & because he sneezes, we ...