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Baffler Archives: Poems

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Equations
The calculation is simple enough; he comes for you when you least expect, when you are minding your own business in the middle of a pecan grove, shells at your feet, the sweet rot of overripe fruit, birds feasting all about, and suddenly, like light, he rests on you and you ...

Song of Whiteout and Backache
1 Well I’m so white, when the lights go out, I glow in the dark.   So white, when I wear white clothes all you see are the stripes on my socks.   White as the sun’s bare rays—iron-heavy and hot.   White as the grass that’s ...

Jeweler
Diamonds are a girl’s best friend; so let her have them. My work is strictly   for the primitive sex and I deal only in pearls. In my showroom   you will find any assortment of boys dripping with them—from the ears,   wrists. You should see the dapper ...

The Free World
I bind my old     grievances    to a helium balloon.     A long memory,   I have been warned,    is a curse.     Everywhere I go,     someone   has ...

Luke Cool Hand I’m Your Father
Nurturing people into junkies par for the course   pills & fear & salt & sugar & grease   @the dollar store they did have a choice     Softly killing them softly   @consumerist rates science isn’t final   on a few points if you ...

Trifling Bureaucracies
And how did trifling bureaucracies lodge such    a vast root      in me   I forget my real vocation not executive not my want like     stepping back into daughterhood   rehearsing defiance to empty rooms the ...

Faulty Logic
February 14, 2014
I’m from the rare generation that didn’t go to war,         but it’s still the inheritance. Air raid sirens wail throughout the mall. I think about you less on sunny days,         though ...

Kingdom / Kingdom 2
February 13, 2014
  Kingdom   In the kingdom, the open mouths   of flowers aren’t asking.   *   When you say she’s “gone,” you mean she’s home.   She’s sheets   Cold cirrus fingers.   Or she’s expected soon at the ...

The Back Country
Who stole the lake? The frightful bandits   with their hats full of feathers, they stole the lake.   When did they steal it? When the sun was covered   with a cloud full of needles, it was then they stole it.   Who shall retrieve it? The hatless ...

Tranche I / Tranche II
February 10, 2014
Tranche I I have lived through the end of syntax I have lived though the imperial grammars I have lived through the bursting of a bubble visible from space I have lived through the suicide of money to preserve the life of value I have lived through the fatal sacrifice of ...

Projecting Love
February 08, 2014
For Eiko & Komo dragging her fingernails across the air as she comes stage left, he steps from darkness into his flesh under the minatory glare of X the flexed tendons of his fingers, her eyes and lips flare when he stumbles she is aware without looking almost they embrace ...