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Baffler Archives: Poems

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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 ...

Jim Carroll’s Ass
Nothing seems real  yet I’m willing to play ‘the real’ game for ones I love and when I’m sick I go get pills but more and more hovering above it I’m and then is it a question of for who that’s why I no longer have memories I don’t care about them though I ...

The Karen Horney Progressions
i. I once met a woman who’d been run over by a truck. Well, a cement mixer. Leg like a pancake. Was her name Karen Horney? I don’t think so.   ii. I once met a girl who’d been struck by a truck. Cement mixer, two tons. Name was Karen Horney. Or was ...

Annette Peacock
Barbara Giraffe Martin Egret Allison Hippopotamus Nadezhda Goat Lose my body Shake the hell Thurston Wildebeest Omar Snake Priscilla Lioness Zainab Elephant Herman Gorilla Margaret Octopus Bring a noise Flung in joy Steve Swallow Creature Palette Arthur Weird Bug Patricia ...

Ordering a Casket from Amazon Prime
Avoid cramps by keeping your grip parallel to the hip. 20 gauge steel, but surprisingly light. It’s called the Atlas XL. You may hear Atlas and conjure a collection of maps and charts with his picture as the frontispiece. He is the sea. He is a mountain whose cave shelters the ...

Sea Urchin
1. I’m reacquiring taste, returning to the natural Relish for learning how a woman sits, miming her calm, Associating her with piano, the saints, good dreams, Refracted light, whatever else that science wants to dull. I’m tying her to logic, even easily. See, Keats Was wrong ...

Head of the Family
Animals never choose to end their lives because they cannot imagine narratives, and so cannot dread how they will continue, scientists say. Only those who can conceive of a future can want to give up a part in it.   So whales beaching themselves by the dozens, sick leader ...

Fit to Print
Later in the month appears a variant of concern. The news gets torn up. The room is also a house in the immersive tests and rioting. The houses you definitely don’t want include a deepening political divide. Not guilty of homicide a counterfactual fable in a case that ignited ...

You Choose the World: A Poetics
Called inside by the consonance of the familiar, you down the irremediable loneliness of something long gone, its bootleg liquor. What if instead you remained in the mosquito lushness of the present, letting your arms and legs feel the itch spread toward the world’s edges? ...