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Baffler Archives: Poems

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The Proverbs of Heck
The body at poolside confesses its snacks. The office of litigation has wider views than the kitchen of charity. Gauze curtains admit a desire of sight. Better a dinner at Herb’s than the noise of the kids. Mop and sponge restore nothing to the bottle. Enclose in census files ...

Mi’e’raj (The Ascension)
the ladder rising to the sky (after the soil seethes up the waters calm down) this is not Jacob’s ladder   Mount Ahır, Engizek . . . Öksüz . . . Berit . . . Zeytun Springs . . . Blood River Bridge . . . Yeşilgöz Gorge from the deep comes the resolve of the upsurge in ...

Canada! I’m Sorry!
March 01, 2023
I am trying to step on the moon but my boss is calling to yell at me. He says you didn’t think enough about Canada. You were supposed to write about everything, and you wrote about everything but Canada. The place where he is saying this is inside my phone, which is inside my ...

sometimes i think i’m falling apart
“To many, SPAM is the epitome of horror in a can, a filthy amalgam of discarded orts of industrial animal slaughter and sinister chemical additives that require a doctorate in chemistry—or necromancy—to decipher . . . a noxious culinary miscreant.” —Robert Ji-Song ...

the myth of the end of the world
for Lewis Freedman     ok so let there be a pedal point, in thought a sustained tone that other thoughts can come and go   gutbucket back to thread and thread to fiber   spirit of the shack   i tell Lewis “well i also want something other than time” ...

Foodborne
Apportioned severed fowl all twined and trussed.   The Powell high school cigarette behind the ball field, beside the cemetery, inside the ash cloud of urn and un-earn.   Cartography of butcher paper stains. And where the creases have gone juicy soft.   Imagine ...

Further Education
The last mouse left in the experiment has failed to figure out the pattern of activity that releases the food pellets over the course of what seems like a week but is in fact fifteen years, far longer than the typical lifespan of a mouse, but of course   many factors are ...

Interior Design
December 12, 2022
The last phone booth in the world took up residence in our living room. I liked to hide there, sometimes to cry or sleep. Other times, to read news   about the war. I never tried to work in there. I didn’t grade essays or sort receipts for taxes. The phone didn’t work, ...

love just don’t fade away
I said I’m proud of you , he said the same I said what’s that missing from , what’s that hail and will I wake from these visions of defection to change them in time to change them ? to puncture that kind of gun wave gun lean gun warning crisis call that eschatological ...

Cascade
This has been the season we splayed in rooms rewarded to us for an interlude   by the ruse of others, well and coldly lit. You played a long,   sometimes fitful song while my insides turned within me, the tissue   outside its place, blood the wrong color. Ache has ...