Clytemnestra
Sky streaked with azure and bloodred.
No wind.
No oar.
That memory swift-hooved, tramples itself,
the cart wheel rutting in the ditch
as if the spokes
would turn backward. That ...
Baffler Archives: Poems
Columns
All morning, tax evasion
In the subway station liquid
Drops on our heads
While the F train never comes
Trash overflows
Outside the marble university
Utopia’s attainable but pressing
On truth where it’s tender
Results in feeling metal
Bands around your heart snap open
It’s pretty ...
From Fall Creek
Time past tumult-fodder getting wet
by the ton plummets up the sky
dispersing wild syllables an anarchy
of storming signs into systems
that can’t be understood for a simple reason
that everything is participating
loftily or low invading the public
sphere with swaggering ...
[…]
The gods have spoken.
The gods said nothing.
All our clamour
sounded the same.
Your window is closing,
they said, they didn’t say
on what. I am not a window,
I said, I am the view.
The window was on the ground floor.
The ground was grass.
The room had a working ...
Flight Attendant,
To land this position, you have to be able to talk to ducks. Actual ducks. Ducks over the horizon, ducks at the end of a bottle, ducks that if they were strewn out at the edge of a pond at night and you saw them in a bit of light would trigger your phobias. Ducks on drugs. Ducks ...
While Listening to Bach’s Double Violin Concerto in D Minor
The order. The order of drifting clouds, tree crowns,
bending grass in the breeze, the descent
and swirl of windblown petals, the hiss
of reeds, the friction and whisper
of green bamboos, the gyration
of yellow pollen on the road, the order
of an exploding storm, the imprint
of ...
Jim Carroll’s Ass
Nothing seems real yet I’m willing
to play ‘the real’ game for ones I love
and when I’m sick I go get pills
but more and more hovering above it I’m
and then is it a question of for who that’s why
I no longer have memories I don’t care about them
though I ...
The Karen Horney Progressions
i.
I once met a woman who’d been
run over by a truck.
Well, a cement mixer.
Leg like a pancake.
Was her name Karen Horney?
I don’t think so.
ii.
I once met a girl who’d been
struck by a truck.
Cement mixer,
two tons.
Name was Karen Horney.
Or was ...
Annette Peacock
Barbara Giraffe
Martin Egret
Allison Hippopotamus
Nadezhda Goat
Lose my body
Shake the hell
Thurston Wildebeest
Omar Snake
Priscilla Lioness
Zainab Elephant
Herman Gorilla
Margaret Octopus
Bring a noise
Flung in joy
Steve Swallow
Creature Palette
Arthur Weird Bug
Patricia ...
Ordering a Casket from Amazon Prime
Avoid cramps by keeping your grip parallel to the hip. 20 gauge steel, but surprisingly light. It’s called the Atlas XL. You may hear Atlas and conjure a collection of maps and charts with his picture as the frontispiece. He is the sea. He is a mountain whose cave shelters the ...
Sea Urchin
1.
I’m reacquiring taste, returning to the natural
Relish for learning how a woman sits, miming her calm,
Associating her with piano, the saints, good dreams,
Refracted light, whatever else that science wants to dull.
I’m tying her to logic, even easily. See, Keats
Was wrong ...
Head of the Family
Animals never choose to end their lives because they cannot imagine
narratives, and so cannot dread how they will continue, scientists say.
Only those who can conceive of a future can want to give up a part in it.
So whales beaching themselves by the dozens, sick leader ...