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Baffler Archives: Poems

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Once I Was a Great Bullfighter
I love every square inch the monuments aren’t. I walk over them, same the as-of-yet unmarked days on the calendar that will remind us to pour one out and think of our sweet dead friend. His guffaw a black carrot of denial burned in the toasters of our memory. It’s a question ...

Memories of Charles Street
January 06, 2025
My father loved to leave me in a movie theater by myself beginning when I was six   seated alone by the aisle   He paid the usher a dime to make sure no one kidnapped or molested me   Michael Ansara, Jeff Chandler, and Ruth Roman were my cartoon heroes living and ...

Misfire
My one good eye continues to have the last laugh; it has no other company; once considered a perceived threat: it has since been removed off the X but from time to time still levels with the clumsy cataracts of the widowed key-maker: my one good eye follows the crow’s feet ...

Fig.
January 06, 2025
if joy is a politics of citation, then my mother doesn’t break down into anything   if joy is a politics of citation, then in my palms, wombs. then my mother’s tongue slurping slurping bone canal lig ament lig a ment lament me. i mean head tilted back slurping slurping ...

Threnody for the Letter M
The maker is blessed, though babble be the measure of the necessary wood, that matter, the mind’s muttering   sounds, μὺ μῦ, a hum, a moan, a moon, the myth a mouth is, making murmur into the intricate dust of the moth’s   fragile wing, muons & other ...

Nuclear War
October 28, 2024
At the university there is a mysterious course In which a black & white film begins with war And ends with a dog biting a ball   A student says she’s reminded That the human body is mostly water   Another says she’s reminded Of the sermon Van Gogh wrote on a ...

Poem Inspired by Everything
I would just like to point out, but I always end up pointing in. “Everyone’s holier than thou! & I’m definitely rolling the dice!” a camo-clad gent w/ dork beer a good sixteen fiats away exclaims—just as I was measuring how to use inkling in a work: this report ...

Clytemnestra
October 28, 2024
Sky streaked with azure and bloodred.    No wind. No oar.   That memory swift-hooved, tramples itself,    the cart wheel rutting in the ditch       as if the spokes   would turn backward. That ...

All morning, tax evasion
October 28, 2024
In the subway station liquid Drops on our heads While the F train never comes Trash overflows Outside the marble university   Utopia’s attainable but pressing On truth where it’s tender Results in feeling metal Bands around your heart snap open It’s pretty ...

From Fall Creek
September 03, 2024
Time past tumult-fodder getting wet by the ton plummets up the sky dispersing wild syllables an anarchy of storming signs into systems that can’t be understood for a simple reason that everything is participating loftily or low invading the public sphere with swaggering ...

[…]
September 03, 2024
The gods have spoken. The gods said nothing. All our clamour sounded the same.   Your window is closing, they said, they didn’t say on what. I am not a window, I said, I am the view.   The window was on the ground floor. The ground was grass. The room had a working ...

Flight Attendant,
September 03, 2024
To land this position, you have to be able to talk to ducks. Actual ducks. Ducks over the horizon, ducks at the end of a bottle, ducks that if they were strewn out at the edge of a pond at night and you saw them in a bit of light would trigger your phobias. Ducks on drugs. Ducks ...