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Baffler Archives: Poems

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Why so angry, Bluto?
Your low frequency growl inspires feelings of dread. You want to seize the world by its neck, tear it in half with your tombstone teeth. When you storm down the street, swigging from a bottle of XXX and punching telephone poles to splinters, fleeing hooligans dive down ...

All the Answers I Ask
Raymond Chandler, Redacted   the lady discovered kingsley looked harder in leather discovered a bashful cowboy   a little fawn in sunglasses the lady discovered foul play and boyfriends of ice asking questions   mr bitter gilded his grill kingsley spat on a rose   hatless ...

Artemisia Mourns Her Husband
Tattered curtains drawn her eyes shift down to plum robes   one shoulder is exposed—lips red ready to take him in. Ashes with a bit of wine,   he meets her lips   she takes him in— joined again.   Spoon by spoon he left too soon she is consumed ...

After I Die
I am reborn as an animalthat breaks into dental clinicslong after sundown to suck laughing gasfrom its dark mask.               I am rebornas an animal that keeps watchon the liquor store until the ...

Narrated by Leonard Nimoy
We were in search of the garden, marzipanfruits and flesh, glazed babies posed on mallow flower,rose and Rose of Sharon. In search of the backgate, iron selvage, and strips of muslin, a chipped brass strikeplate. In search of the doomed search partylost searching for the doomed ...

The refugees born for a land unknown
March 11, 2016
The refugees born for a land unknown We have dismissed their wrongs, now dull and old, And little judgment days lost in the dark.   “I have fled through land and sea, blank land and sea, Because my house is besieged by murderers And I was wrecked in the ocean, crushed ...

Vision
The actual “capture” presents no problem. Electron guns cover the rows of pixels at 25 sweeps per second, refreshing and changing intensities. 28 gray values make feature extraction the challenge. Efficient decision trees collapse in the combinatorial ...

Memory
People are walking back and forth on the city streets buying food, newspapers, attending to business Their faces are flushed, their lips full and bright. You lifted the sheet to look at his face you bent to kiss him in the way you always did, but it was the last time. He looked ...

from Absolute Solitude
For God’s sake, don’t touch me. The hands of a leper might fill you with fear, but these hands of mine will fill you with dread. They are cold and meek and moist and for a reason I myself fail to understand they have the vicious apathy of a corpse.   Translated ...

Ulysses XXI
I advanced into the crowd, no one knew my name— if had they known, would it have mattered: did I know myself? And wheeling around, I was molded into a shape by the shadowy light, as if this mob, swelling and indifferent, were a sea-breeze off of which something good might blow ...