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Baffler Archives: Poems

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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 ...

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 ...