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Baffler Archives: Poems

Columns

Ballad of Susan Smith
September 13, 2013
I put my car into reverse On a lee and lonely This will be my babies’ hearse Down by the green lake side-ee-o   I am a daughter of the Mills On a lee and lonely Young I am but doomed to kill Down by the green lake side-ee-o   I had a love I thought was true On a ...

Doppio
September 03, 2013
Latin beans through Italian machines for that perfect cup. German autos in the parking lot and Vivaldi in the coffee shop drive the cost of comfort up several cents per pound.

5:30 P.M.—Friday
September 03, 2013
Cold wind and cars stall in lines on N. Lamar. The parking lot to the “natural foods” grocery store and the “locally owned” bookstore crowds with machines that complete the escape from ignored old earth-bound time questioned by carbon dioxide leaked in a ...

The Ring of Strategic Influence
August 28, 2013
It’s sometimes valuable from a military standpoint to be able to engage in deception. Dick Cheney TRANSLATIONS PART predawn vertical insertion for invasion unlawful or arbitrary deprivation of life for killing “You always write it’s bombing, bombing, bombing. It’s not ...

There is Always Another Revolution
Behold thou art like a satellite that takes control of the planet it was orbiting; like dreams that rebel against sleep; like prisoners who take for themselves prisoners; like the fields and factories that rise up against the workers; like a God who takes his own name in vain.

Race Inauguration Day
Parades, but not-a-one in the meter of a march. There were parties. No apology. Then there were more parties.   Still many of our former owners spat at progress, at celebration, at transparency, our fought-for step up from nothingness.   Masked, we forgave them. Civil ...

Zones
The house spent on transpacific flights pass like a sandstorm through the Kazakh steppes, lodging a single grain—an irritant to memory—within the furrowed cortex. Nacred by revolving doubt, it grows a pearl as black as the ocean depths and lustrous as the moon through ...

[If I had invented homosexuality…]
August 05, 2013
If I had invented homosexuality It would be entirely different Would be incredibly archaic like an Egyptian statue Or two boys that are pals with each other Would be I beg your pardon, Mr. Freud, Immovably fixed at the crazy level of adolescence. The sexual ruling ...

Exercise
August 05, 2013
Is it the word “dream” that causes so much         trouble? Dreams are there like clouds floating endlessly         in an except for them blue sky Over the rim Is it the word, dream, that ...

This Is
1 “If you can read this, you’re too close.” This has been specially hand-crafted in Mexico. “Hi, you’ll do” on a tee-shirt made by young girls in Thailand? America poses in whose mirror? Irascible. Insouciant. 2 This is a five star trance. To have this ...

March Ample Life
Methought I saw my late live-in theory     crossing the fireplace like a train For the Headless Horseman is bald     in the grave where the hair grows long And Maud was the androgyne without a club     on the path to ...