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Baffler Archives: Poems

Columns

2020
When I was a child I had no trouble destroying the world with mind-rays. The neighbors who communalized our kitchen. The empty ghost-houses in the overgrown bushes behind the crumbling cement walls where ghouls screeched. The stepfather who wrestled my dog Nemo out of my ...

What I Saw at a Frozen Creek
shallow enough, close to thaw, the ice beginning to fissure like latticework bowed: a teensy fish, tadpole maybe, wiggling in place, its Labradorite carapace glinting prismatic an hour before dusk— striving to be from some untold laze, petrified midstride through the numinous ...

Unto Ourselves (1)
Firs trembled at the edge of a massive debris flow in the asphalt-heat of summer just between you and me, said the field guide in an undertone leaning forward, you have to get beyond the expectation that you’re ever going to pull things together it was a queer thing to say in ...

Unto Ourselves (2)
Even when we realized we’d stopped, in every essential way stopped moving forward, when we came to see we were descending, even more tightly bound to the vortex as images rushed by in front of us and a blue whale rotted on the sand in Bolinas, its stink drifting southward ...

QB 468 .W 48x W5
1 of 3 QB 468 .W48x W5 Unknown possible utterances—unpublished non-commercial recording—open reel magnetic tape—1948-1980—1/4’’ Magnetic tape (polyester-based tape with ferromagnetic particles embedded in binder layer) wound onto 7” diameter plastic reel with ...

TJ 1015 .H66
1 of 3 TJ 1015 .H66 Unknown possible utterance—compact cassette tape—ca. 1996-1963- present—1/8’’ magnetic tape (polyester-based tape with ferromagnetic particles embedded in binder layer) attached to take-up reels enclosed in plastic case—Dolby noise ...

Thieves
Translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid   I know I’ve got nothing left— all my food was eaten by thieves who are laughing now and burping and farting in the hall (the thieves are old neighbors and classmates and cousins). You know I want for nothing— I let that food go of ...

Touch Haiku
What is touch? A child in an airport hugs grandpa’s legs. The grownups smile. Braiding my daughter’s hair, drawing the strands along my palms, smelling them, that’s all in the past. But my husband’s whole body is in the present. And holding my mom’s hands, singing you ...

Bailout Haiku
The banks were betting on derivatives and when everything collapsed our taxes paid to bail them out without any oversight what they would do with all those billions we gave them while the foreclosures whirled on spinning the country around like a basketball on some dude’s ...

Wartime Powers
The house passes a bailout for time. Every day is shortened by two hours. It’s ratified in the senate; the president, may he die, applauds. They underpay workers to go around adjusting clocks so the minute hands can keep up the pace. Watches go on strike, then grandfather ...

La Llorona Tells Me to Stop Crying
It’s Saturday night in America and the trees are full of policemen again— clinging to the upper branches, emitting little hoots and caws There are bloody handprints on the shoulders of my shirts because I am out too late pouring the river down my throat, pretending to care ...