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Baffler Archives: Poems

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Bad Weather
So used to drought, the city looked astonished at the sky & I have to believe that’s why   she didn’t see me in the crosswalk. I was on my way to celebrate another year   among my friends, then drowned by laughter in an ambulance as it raced ...

Pluto.4
December 04, 2016
                                                                             we win from time to time                                  abandoned above adaptable positions ...

Pluto.3
December 04, 2016
                                               judged by the way we fall in                                    love in the bathroom in sweating out the ...

Long division at the dinner table
Under the windowsill flowers, my father, stark like math without calculator, sitting so still and nothing but a blackened gum eraser and little yellow pencil at table, among the kitchen pastel, a noon window as I divide big number into big number, add another line, another mark ...

Song
September 05, 2016
I wait each night for a self. I say the mist, I say the strangetumble of leaves, I say a motorin the distance, but I meana self and a self and a self.A small cold windcoils and uncoils in the cornerof every room. A vagrant.In the dreamI gather ...

Nothing Wrong with a Maple
September 05, 2016
Go fast, white light, go faster out of sightThe Devil does know        how to row my boat ashore      HallelujahOrange juice, a swing set, the creaminess of milk ...

Ode to Lithium #419: Perfect
September 05, 2016
. . . I needed to do something about my moods. It quickly came down to a choice between seeing a psychiatrist or buying a horse . . . and since I had an absolute belief that I should be able to handle my own problems, I naturally bought a horse. —Kay Redfield Jamison I ...

Incendiary Art: The Body
September 05, 2016
I’ve nightmared your writhe, glumfists punching their way out of yourown body, the blind stumble throughthe buckled vein of your throat asyour nerve endings sputtered and blew.I’ve dipped my finger into a vaporouspool of your skin. The heat blessedyour whole new self with ...

Sorrow Is My Own Yard
What I worship both wartime & pax in low country   is sweat& pay-dirt & death to the tea tax   & any day I want now I can say to my captors   tomorrow, you watchwe’ll be the end of America   & history with horseshoes for ...

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 ...