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Baffler Archives: Poems

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Autumn Olive
The day Congress announced their articles of impeachment, it snowed in Mississippi: big, puffy snow-globe flakes that fell like fake news at the end of a long, brittle year. On my walk, I look for the understory, the autumn olive and its sweet scent I mistake for ...

The Poem of Force
What is that man doing? He has been crouched in that corner for an eternity, eight minutes, likely an hour, his gray face expressionless and shimmering from the shallow pool water, the silver rim of his glasses another prick of light quilting the ripples rowdy children make as ...

I Can Drink the Distance
January 06, 2020
As “a stone in love” with falling, “I wound the water’s face” Then wear the mask of water all the way down into the lake. The distance of my falling remains a loss, an abyss I’ve consented to so arrive not as thought But as some angel of ...

Without the Pelt of a Lion
January 06, 2020
  Rage: Sing, Goddess, of the on top of love And the president’s chronic angers, his mouth, a burning Bird of prey, a flood of flames, and nowhere not touched; Nowhere, the peace he makes of the world with war, Luxury, club, spear; the bodies of refugees He leaves in ...

Trespass
-Galveston, TX What in the year of whose Lord 2019 to whom the concept of mercy for everyone is meaningless do you call armed, uniformed males who dog-walk a human being— beasts riding saddled animals down paved streets with a cuffed, leashed man in tow? No riddle here, no ...

the blue shared earth
November 04, 2019
when wildness & brown was hit by the car it hollered & spun the wild brown dog looked like a dust devil gathering wind in an empty baseball field   a Carolina Dog in a town of factory workers & missing hands with all its body   it did a ...

Jemima Spits
November 04, 2019
Fool had ten thousand acres but needed my ass to make it complete. He rubbed me like a good luck charm and I poisoned his pancakes. Had him under my spell for a harvest but Miss Martha was a witch from way back. She put a conjure on me wild and white as a Mount Vernon ...

Something I Ate
November 04, 2019
Jemima jawing at me in the dark, the box of mix thumping and jumping on the table in tune to her swiveling hips, setting my dream kitchen aglow with a grin as bright as Jeanne Crain’s pinky ring. I don’t want to hear anything she’s got to say. I know she’s no good, ...

Reject the angel, and give the Muse a kick
November 04, 2019
The Muse cannot dance flamenco only Lick the slippers, beg for animation. The  is missing. The  contains no speech acts. The Muse’s distance can be resolved by Fish hooks, military intervention. The Muse exhausts before she brings enough. The Muse plays ...

Anatta Ghazal
November 04, 2019
After a friend tells me names and dreams occupy the same part of the brain, which is why we forget both. It’s not an atomic number, your name, it codes no secret core of you. Your name doesn’t know any language of light, thick-tongued like a spent tennis shoe; it holds no ...

One Vow After the Other
November 04, 2019
Let me had been the star watching that night in 1978, the rain battering the building like a child yelling More! More! Again! or the moth in the corner of the room like the best shadow, as my parents discussed the idea of me, child number two. Maybe they held hands tight as a ...

Proposition
September 01, 2019
That the smell of cows drifting in the open window is indeed that of a living beast. That I too am a living beast. That the body I possess is inhabited only by me. That my body is neither at rest nor occupied by dramatic motion. That I am, by my best account, fully alive. That ...