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Baffler Archives: Poems

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Divagation
November 06, 2023
Under stars, listening to a coloratura soprano, he looks at glimmering lights on a mesa where suited technicians use gloved hands inside sealed boxes to assemble pits   for W88 warheads. As he watches, twenty-one miles to the north, three men smoke crack, abduct a woman, ...

The Outpost
I’m ordered out to a pile of rocks like a distinguished corpse from the Iron Age. The others are still asleep in the tent stretched out like spokes in a wheel.   In the tent, the stove is in charge: a large snake that swallows a ball of fire and hisses. But it’s quiet ...

Untitled
Each has his mouth around a neighbor’s leg. Outside, the steppe glows. The summer evening is easy.   I am riding north on a dead train, to the city Where the dead sun gleams like ice.   My way is calm. My passions are past. I don’t know. Shall mother meet me? Shake ...

Suspiria
September 11, 2023
I know when he began to dance with me cranberries started to burn in pocket— I smelled red smoke of sugar under my feet, sugarfoot, a boy worth burning for—   and into his pants I’d push my white hands, deeper into the sweeter red currant in a darkened cell until he ...

FIGURE [ ? ]
September 11, 2023
The sickened flesh grown too aware of itself. Limbs touching limbs. Teeth grinding inside a closed mouth. Proximity has everything to do with love: I become your face daily a new face. When we walk, the dog seems large or small. My mother mails me a packet of powdered broth. No ...

Hog Lagoon
September 11, 2023
you can smell it soon as you enter the state caught from space the pools look like wounds in the earth cut precise and surgically pink hundreds of millions live and die inside the factory waste falls through the slats & slides into pits stored in the open to be sprayed onto ...

In This One World
September 11, 2023
The grassland comes up to the edge of the road on which I’m standing. The car has turned off.   Has been turned off. A gunshot is easily heard. The grassland exists. My eyes see   that the land is a banner the wind holds up. The ground turns under and around and then ...

10/11
It was Lisa’s birthday    She turned 143   we celebrated with pretzels and watched the Descendants of man fishing [a] manmade lake   The water green    the sky tender, night trains. strawberries.   wind-stunted ...

heathkit tv 1980
what my father made and gave me, nouns:   transistor, fastening, capacitor. he was a sort   of sorcerer, wizard at building, his mind   a sleek machine of memory, rebuilt   from youthful chaos and some suffering   we didn’t discuss, just ...