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.
Baffler Archives: Poems
Columns
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) ...
Against Poetry
There is no word in English for the circle
left on a table from a cold glass,
or for the difference in flavor
between fresh and dried fruit. There’s no precise
way to say I pushed my thumbs through the eyes
of the old living except to say all that, and then
it barely ...
Pony
After the snakebite, I tried to make noises
With the clouds in my throat, the dissolving
Snow of my tongue: but the young ones
Kept crying and calling and couldn’t hear me.
How could I have explained anyway my ...
Auto-Correct
“Lynch whenever works best for you.”
I mean, “Lunch.” It’s too late. So come
archived images of black bodies, hot.
I can tell they’re hot, even dead,
by their skin. Later, I find a market
with the cheapest eggplants I’ve ever seen.
In perfect rows. I want their ...
Age of Osteo Collosus
Thank you doctor,
it must be so, each bone depleted—
each wish revealed.
Doll of fired clay & dried fruit,
of glassy-winged genitalia,
detritus of peanut brittle, cold
steel, pumice stone, partial
knee, rubble swan neck,
taxidermied ...