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Baffler Archives: Poems

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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 ...

To Whom It May Concern
September 01, 2019
In the polaroid in a drawer of the housethe other relatives picked over, I’m the blur in the background, mop of silvery hair. The rasp of the ash pan when you empty the stoveis a bit like my voice, stuck in the chimney like a nest. You won’t have to know how I ...

Tenebrae
September 01, 2019
Today I'm smoke up the chimney over ashes of trustand I don't see a Phoenix egg down there, do you? A broken vase of red carnations like meat on the floor,a future of slivers and shards and splintered bone. Everything my father ever feared, all that my motherknew but ...

The Moment We Get There
September 01, 2019
We just have to want to and to think hard about it and then we can lift over the wheat fields and fuzzy orange cattle, one of us always faster than the others, one of us still on the ground or beyond the fences, catching up later. Flying is like seeing ourselves from inside ...

Who Left Without Saying Goodbye
September 01, 2019
I wish I could bring yousome things you may have forgotten, like white locust honey, and those children we met once in Lefkas, named after gods: Telemachus counting to 100 on the square while Aphrodite hid. I want to give you their getting lost, their having somewhere to go. And ...

They said I was an alternate,
said the case was in the bag, open and shut, they said he was black, there was a gun, or gun plus black equals him A no-brainer, they said No question he was black They said, do the math, dummy, doesn’t it add up If you think they said Think of our children Our ...

VOX
I looked for it in the afterlight lapping the edge of the long valley. I sought it in canopy, in the horizon’s fringe, past wavering powerlines, the transistor station newly painted. I threaded the margin between the drainage wash and the waste river, thinking I would find it ...

Love Poem
The tennis match was still on and while some watched, some sat around and shucked oysters, cut them from their shells, the score going in the background-Love, 15, 30, etc… A peculiar system, though what did I know, certainly not the name of either player, how many games ...