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Baffler Archives: Poems

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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 ...

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, ...