Love Actually
When mumblecore makes it to television, I will understand it better
Baffler Archives: Poems
Columns
Nope
As for yes I’ve been against it since ballet & I refused to leap like a little white flag
A Dispatch from the Last Stout Elm in Chatham’s Fair Mount Cemetery (N.J.)
Here, too, a tablespoon of light spills from each temporary star—
Argument
Don’t tell me that I have a problem. I am the problem.
It’s a Limousine
It is nothing like a shark but the monochrome blanched off-white
of its long body is dumb like a shark’s nose and dead eyes and
it is turning a corner.
Justice
Less for the murders than the smug face remorseless smirking on the screen
Study of Beet and Earring
Vegetable fuchsia but faded, gilt
gone bad from its season in Hell. Plucked up
with dirt on its cheek, petrified
as a rose shut in a box and dull as a brain
left too long in one place.
Sedate glamour on the counter, unhinged
from my skin: golden chime, faintly Egyptian.
Truth ...
The Wind Needs To Blow Through Here
when his fork clinks against the breakfast plate,
my day is lit by a covetous rage, a fist swollen with
a hunger for the freshest passages of air I can quickly
forge through him and now a much less civilized feeling
has knotted itself inside my throat, over every ...
Deportation Letter
for my cousin Julia Zetino
The words Notice to Appear flap like a monarch trapped in a puddle.
Translation: ten years in a cell cold enough to be named Hielera.
If not that, a plane with chains locked to her legs. My aunt swam across
the Río Bravo twice to see her second ...
A fourteen-line poem on time and money
1. Time is thought of as the movement toward the
2. other person. The
3. absolutely other.
4. Like the woman on the plane
5. who yanked the head off a chicken
6. pulled fifty bucks from its insides
7. then stuffed the dead chicken into a bag
8. and threw it away.
9. If ...
The financial sector
A city of dust, some radicals across the way. I want to know more about a slit and a hole. I enter into this circulatory system. Two boys remove their seatbelts to pummel one another. No shortening and no lessening. It follows that the goal of our economic system is the ...
Love, oh love, oh careless love
Fuck, I can’t stand when I
slice a grapefruit to an uneven
split. For this small fault, I’m cursing
myself even while I replay the scene:
my student comes red-rimmed
to me and starts to spill—
her work unfinished, her essay
(Bradbury’s images of innocence
and corruption) ...