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Baffler Archives: Poems

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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 ...

Nashville Drip Season
April 26, 2020
He removed himself with his hands, an effort not unnoticed. People threw shells, congotronic drumming looped from the roof. At the same time, days of orphan motels, smoking for a living, public swards for romance, disgruntlement— the things that really pink a day’s ...

Kofi Mnemonic
April 26, 2020
There is a great sadness in this poorest of lands. The only Lambo in the land belongs to my Christian friend. A Lambo is a Lamborghini, a piece of Italian art on blaster wheels. Nightly, a piece of an Italian is wheeled into the lamb I’m always on the verge of— the most ...

Denouement
When I was a teenager, I made her the enemy. She worked third shift and after my father and sister drifted to sleep, I’d call my boyfriend and tell him how awful my mother was—how she chided me for not getting all the dust off her figurines, how she thought my shirt was too ...

We Carry the Earth
We bring the harvest and lay it at an altar of bread crust, pierced gold earrings, and the bones of our first born Banana leaves halo the foundation of her body, we salt the sand she rests upon, sprinkling the mineral from seashells We pick translucent grapes and squeeze the ...

Standstill
The killdeer build their nest along the gravel drive. Small, long-legged birds, the pair of them guarding their clutch of camouflaged eggs in the frosted grass. It’s their nature to lead predators astray, feigning injury with a broken wing. Here we are in each other’s path, ...

Say Each Day Your Body Wakes Another Body
opens inside of you. First fissure, then split, then spread: this body unfurling thick and heavy-headed as a peony, as desire. Say your outer body works its world-hands daily to push your inner body back into shadow and seed, some bloody chamber. Say while one body isn’t ...

The Spaceship in Tamri
Above it was a sign welcoming refugees          a poster of Sonny Rollins blowing the world into another. The roof is gone     burned away so it could land where it could. The aliens we are recognize its ...

The Champions
Too much rain over Moscow but a prime minister kisses the champions on their foreheads. His dark suit slick with water. The champions are soaked as if they’ve floated from the sea but they are jubilant. So many Africans are floating in the sea. Are drowning among ...

A Conversation Between Women
My friend, who lost her husband twice, first in death and then in betrayal, orders the pinot noir. Outside our window lemon trees. The loss she does not speak of— unable to have children with a man like that.       That she could love him into her ...