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Baffler Archives: Poems

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Yo Mama
November 02, 2015
She loves him, because he cannot be eaten. Then, she tries. Half dead, he resists. His late flinch entreats her.   Pale little legs, that pod, a few hairs, almost no eyes— this least is what she craves yet cannot have.   Keep me, he asks. She bounces him from paw ...

The American Academy on Mars
Techno by necessity, classicizing on a glorious whim, our buildings house the persistent idea that no stretch of terrain anywhere in the universe cannot be balanced on a fulcrum placed midway between wilderness and city, the howling emptiness and the whisper of a weary and ...

Bitter-Berry Daybreak
October 06, 2015
Bitter-berry daybreak bitter-berry sun a mirror has broken between me and him   I try to find the highway perhaps to run away but everywhere the footpaths of his words lead me astray   Pinewood remember pinewood forget however much I lose my way I step on my ...

Aram Ilyich Khachaturian
Free time for whims is what makes age alluring; the aging Khachaturian grew to like touring: Rome—Paris—London—Berlin. He conducted, shook hands, represented the State, gave many an interview, enjoyed his fame through and through. Glory, after all, is ...

Sergey Sergeyevich Prokofiev
I’m walking up Bolshaya Dmitrovka, what is now Pushkinskaya— walking up from the station at Okhotny Ryad— and I find myself stopping in front of the Operetta Theater, stopping and whistling the first few bars of the “Classical ...

It feels nice
It feels nice To sit under a tree. It leads to The internal world.   In the internal world Is the internal forest. Roots and more roots, A forest of roots. Roots growing out of roots, And more coming out of them.   On the topmost branch Of a root Sits the internal ...

New Life
From the fields of a calendar, its snow packed firmly into squares, I farmed you.       Following some paperwork you shipped west       and I flew home ...

School
        I’ve heard the helpless crying of men, I’ve seen a woman wailing over a little dead body. I’ve met many whose eyes suddenly become springs, whose shoulders shake as when they cough. And believe me, nobody does it ...

Mikhail Arkadyevich Svetlov
 A waning crescent melting in the sky— this is the profile of Svetlov, the poet. The tips of his forehead and chin reach for each other, between them nests the clever smile of a man from the city once known as Yekaterinoslav. Stooping, Svetlov carries his leanness ...

Implements
On the shingles, the same color as its fur, a cat’s cut-out.   Shovelled off the ground and tossed into an empty cement bag, it is carried   to a corner of the garden and there left on a mound of trash.   3 kilos of dead cat, its head an unsightly red, is ...

A Parade Tirade
Good night ladies and good night nuns & priests & monks & ministers who never march in peace parades Protestants shouldn’t protest The holy wars are over The only united crusade a fund drive and good night holy ordained ministers who evict peace ...