Wal-Mart Epigram #2
Phil and I went to one of the marts
and bought a rug like we’re supposed to
only thing is it’s purple,
we’re not married, the rug is the wrong size
and my name is Bernadette
Baffler Archives: Poems
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Wal-Mart Epigram #1
If I told you once
I told you a thousand times
we’re not buying it!
put it back!
Idle Music is the Devil’s Band
This is how I learned to stop hating
the smug and arrogant, complicit folk
inside the rampant
suburban ubiquitous vehicles.
This is how I taught myself
that my hatred of their crass
lifestyles of mobile and sanitized
sport and corporate offices burned
more energy than ...
After Rejection
Everyone in my photo collection
Looks as if they’re saying
“Don’t point that thing at me”
So I screen all calls from friends
But answer when salesmen and creditors call
To indulge my many hang-ups
I write polite letters to Tommy Hilfiger
Imploring him to make more baggy ...
Junk
Why is the midnight rain
So much more soothing
Than a dripping sink?
Though downward stains
Of rust are how we think
To cling to life sometimes
Oxidized by pleasure
We’re metallic to the bone
Easily bent, or stretched thin
As wire, conducting heat by breath alone
The torture ...
Columbo in San Cristóbal
People he told the truth
to didn’t trust him
brained by a frying pan
& “just woke up there”
Without a tale to tell to death
or nail to hang his hat on—
thus we honor Amerigo
Merry-go-round to the right
of the roadside shrine
to the saint of dead bugs
Later, sitting ...
Mount Capon Comes to Bozo
A water wagon rides into town
nobody from the waist down some
body’s moved to the Mirage Club
captivity underscores the strangeness
of this life we’ll believe like chickadees
almost any seed and tanked up on Pike’s
Magnolia Shriveler hung like a horse
of a different color ...
Autographeme
A thought on the lip of little sand island, an easy messenger who forgot where to go. I came to laugh in a dirty garden, a thwarted pauselessness considering pearls. I was fluent in salamander. Everything wrote itself onto skin with a tangled blowing. Identity washed its ...
Some Days in the City
Some days, the sky descends to the level of mid-thigh water
the clock-hands come loose, and language is a skiff
over land through the rhythm of your breathing, girl
then I can hear the pink oriole, the body is a metronome
of blood and syllables beating placentas of speech
and ...
A Semi-permissive Environment
My model personality
Slams into the side of a bus
Trained to obliterate or hide
He was suspect of the mother
&; father; could move a whole
Madness while banking on good
Relations. At shutter speed
Not a soul notices candor
Becoming manipulation
I contain ...
Powerslave
Large crowds gather in late industrial style:
Austin, MN; Peoria, IL; Flint, MI.
Quantrill’s corporate raiders and John Brown’s ghost.
DNA marketplace and love for sale, love on the rocks.
Starting a new life on her father’s South Dakota farm.
Sallow August afternoons, ...
In Readiness
A geography for your character can be learned
only after the blind cord frays. I feel impatience,
a gift perhaps, but when applied in retrospect
only a small comfort brought hence
across a footbridge, over carelessly spaced boards.
As if expecting a lamp to be lit by someone ...