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Baffler Archives: Poems

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Outlaw
September 07, 2020
My father shot the neighbors’   dog, and their little girl still plays in front of his   house in the road, cars swerve when they see her   around the blind curve. My father wants to tell her   to be careful, but he’s the ...

Origin Point
September 07, 2020
My mother calls—she’s had the dream again, the one where our first dog, Ivy, has left and taken up with another dog in the woods, and my mother wants to make sure she is happy, so she sits by the stream until finally Ivy and this other dog pass through, and it’s like ...

Requiem for Sleep
September 07, 2020
The awake, all straight-backed and well-groomed, wait at a table made of sharp sunlight. I’m late as usual, but this is the morning I give in, sign over everything: pillow-gluttony, sheet-sickness, the blanket’s wrapper like skin on my skin, clock meaningless. This solo has ...

Theory of the Disappeared Man
September 07, 2020
who looks like my father or his father or an ex or neighbor or someone I’ve never met at all— We’re facing an epidemic and the drugs are still in clinical trials (or would be if the doctors could find them) but now we’ve all grown accustomed to loss, saunter through ...

Trick of Light
September 07, 2020
This is no small thing: to be the wickless candle, borrowed hands of the divine to let there be light even here in the already well-lit rooms.   There’s always more light to be shone when you take from the body: around the ear under the nose— flare the ...

Il Picco
Letter to MarinaMilan, 23 March   You speak of il picco by which you mean the dead have risen to their highest number. The pigeons, exquisite scavengers, bow their heads to forage and peck at the edge of your sill. Below the shuttered windows the sputter and hum of trucks ...

Vines
My mother wrestles with the stakes and I with her, with the tomato vines caught in our decades-old wires. Their stalks threaten to split as the wires (reused, warping) tangle. And we blame everything— the heat, the mosquitoes bearing some new, life-threatening disease—for ...

Mass. Ave.
I was fifteen. My father and I stood at the basement threshold, shouting at each other, maybe the only time. Go, he told me. Just get out. Holding open the white door. And I left, like I’d left other afternoons, slipping that house over my head in the slow dream anger can ...

Alive w/ Mingus Plays the Piano Track One
Myself when I am real leads with the highest concentrated artery in the body. Checks for patterns of coagulation & bruising that isn’t a bruise. Bloodclots. I search my skin from the maze grated in my big toe to the apex of my wave cap adorned, or abandoned in sleep turns. ...

When We See Us
Hair rollers set under what oven doors pack, strands of coiled bounty bound to heat. Real gold won’t flatten till 2000 degrees so Make it hot. Real hot girl shit hot girl summer. I’ve drawn in my peacock feathers, razing with each step on the block. My mumu wafting in the ...

Small Pox in Ibiza
April 26, 2020
I’m singing through the auto-tune. I’m crying through the auto-tune. The auto-tune is strong. My eating game is long. When the Canada Goose jacket got the job over me, I knew we were in a new-old era, the tallest poured concrete column in the world poured out of a water ...