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Baffler Archives: Poems

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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 ...

The City Mouse and the Country Mouse
February 07, 2014
A rough and ready cousin lived on barley and water, and barley water, too,   and slept on a board, while the women of the city dressed themselves as flowers. From   every ear a bauble spun, from every fez a tassel.                         Not me—I was ...

One Way
February 06, 2014
Where the first one came from, we’ll never know, but once it landed, it did what arrows do—it pointed. The headlines read New Shape Discovered: Arrow Invents the Straight and Narrow. Children who had been content to trail snails around the patio suddenly made a gesture ...

The Blackest Black Forest
February 05, 2014
Just nada y nada, which means drop dead in your cleanest socks, o grand and fearless pumpkin. Whether brave or bedraggled or both, the fact that you can put anything (or anyone) into my poem doesn’t mean that you should submit an innocent biped to the vagaries of an ...

Experts are Puzzled
January 12, 2014
Experts are puzzled by the legacy for the purpose of the handing down of which we seem to exist successively and respectively. We seem to exist to correct, in proper order, the minute derangements caused in the legacy of our existence. We on whom it is temporarily bestowed find ...