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Baffler Archives: Poems

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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
September 04, 2017
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
September 04, 2017
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
September 04, 2017
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 ...

Deep Calls to Deep
Until I reached the paddock where the gelding grey collapsed, back hooves clacking like stones to fire, I didn’t know of the melanoma buried like a rotten black bulb in his cheek & neck. I came only to see his viscera tagged & marked, some, like ...

Sanctuary
June 05, 2017
my man was committed to an asylum as a child wild thing    fungal phylum    virus thought they could fix him that he could be fixed his sickness too much too much his diagnoses drugs & boys & language & ...

What Goes Around
Not all wells are tapped. Some draw sufficient to run a hose to a house, the low sulfur cloud a mark of the wet-mouth advantaged. As if that’s not enough, they buy the sprays in shades like police-tape yellow or this-is-not-yours red, so I can’t believe The Kid who, ...