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Baffler Archives: Poems

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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? ...

Green tuppence strewn
This piece is published as web-exclusive material for issue no. 73, “Consolation Prizes.” Green tuppence strewn across a land   that couldn’t tolerate   green tuppence. Then my golden cookies came to the rescue   of a ...

YAK
Throttling pink dreams of night raids. Rats run. Narcan is low. Dogs follow you on the street and men say HOT and HOT seconds before late summer monsoon. Clang at 9, clang at 12. Nature is this repeating joke: this vow, this house, this crown, this yoke. On your phone you swipe ...

moths
January 08, 2024
they ate two camemberts each in front of some soap that flickered every evening on our screen we had no idea how long life lasts: here a flickering of eyeshadow blue thongs gummy bears disco somewhere no one can see it: the appendix and the internal organs this burden called ...

Partially Scripted Nuclear Script
As for scorching script as for psychological pallor there is brinksmanship there is kindled ruin as mythological pathogen as illuminated cinder perhaps as audacious centipede as for molecules in motion script remains exploded & reconfigured as curious mirage being molecule ...

My Mother Meets My Father in an Alternate Koru
January 08, 2024
I said fuck I feel Māori when I’m swimming in a river. You looked at me with the sun escaping your grip.   In the river we look for pounamu or gold or heart-shaped stones. I am hopeful.   I tell you what I live for. Hot looks and hot summers.   You teach me how ...

Divagation
November 06, 2023
Under stars, listening to a coloratura soprano, he looks at glimmering lights on a mesa where suited technicians use gloved hands inside sealed boxes to assemble pits   for W88 warheads. As he watches, twenty-one miles to the north, three men smoke crack, abduct a woman, ...