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Baffler Archives: Poems

Columns

After Avery R. Young
January 07, 2019
Blk is not a country, but I live there Where even the youngest call you baby. Sometimes you ain’t we. Sometimes you is Everybody. Washboard rains come. We Open our mouths for a drink. Rather be radical Than a fool. Oh and no, We’re not interested in killing White people or ...

What Light There Is
When there’s only enough light in the hall to imagine a heaped shirt is the cat, to see the books stacked on the dinner table, but not the glass beside them that drops on its side under your fumbling hand, spreads a dark pool and dribbles to the floor— you close your eyes. ...

Almost a Mothering
January 07, 2019
Consider reduction—the five turkey vultures making sleek dark circles above the field this morning. They hunt by smell, I read, but hunt isn’t right—instead they gather from the air some wind-translated sign of carcass. No punishment, nothing inflicted— the angle of ...

Elegy for a Kaleidoscope
January 07, 2019
We found her in Socorro etched on a tombstone in a cemetery that’s changed public and private hands, though it’s feet that lands change, boots and tarsals. We were grateful to the music of frontiers. She, whom we’ve made our dead, possessed a name between ebb and flow in ...

Diaspora Sonnet 45
Without the noise of home I learn to hear my body’s own sound. It is like sleeping in a narrow boat, waters slapping at the wooden sides wanting to carve a space already hollowed out. The failure of the body’s quiet is the triumph of the ear— having been pressed to the ...

Diaspora Sonnet 49
He should have stayed home and didn’t move beyond seeing himself in the windows of the storefronts, Vegas, Rodeo Drive, the palm lined streets of Miami where petrichor sticks to sinuses and where the secretly despised teens in bikinis cast wide gazes. All this languor tugs him ...

Magnitude and Bond
November 05, 2018
We were, all of us, ethered              when the window broke. Soon after, the floor                             bent. The wood collapsing upon itself formed a new dimension,              a new danger. I wanted to kiss                     ...

Go-go Ode
November 05, 2018
O capacious room, give me your tongues. I’m done with being self- possessed. Take hold, turn the river in me. I’m freed up to be anybody else, my molecules twinned with the sound. O erotic ours, pass me not. Keep me in the pocket. O percussive dissent, devotion is anything ...

The Fathers Swarm to Meet the Boats
November 05, 2018
Every night I dream of fathers, their bodies ferried away  into the far corner between sleep and waking. Always there is a dock, the possibility of splinter. File by file, tall ligaments of ash-light, the fathers move across the wooden slats, careening into water. The bed is a ...

Between the Plumage We Were Everything
November 05, 2018
In the impossible, we bring home to roost a discordant feeling—widow buttons in all black still with our funeral rings. My lovers, all buried, twisted in the soil, can never fathom the wing that will bite me back, but you touch me where my grin shines brightest in a noxious ...

Where to Begin?
First, we’re skinny-dipping, Sam & I, in a pond in Tennessee,   which is his idea, I should say, & the tree with the rope swing looms darker   than the dark night sky.   Second, the harvest moon, which we came here to see,   is nowhere to be ...

Installation
September 03, 2018
When you leave the museum of contemporary art, opening the doors to midday, you may need a few minutes to reset context: the bike shackled to the sign is only a bike, the sign only a sign, no small white exhibit labels. Out here birds are nothing but their crumb-begging ...