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Baffler Archives: Poems

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Vigilance
A pen against the force-field of reflex. Rapid weather. Old wounds. The tasks of air. Apart from sex, a lucky charm in someone else’s pocket. The hands of biologists. Around the waist, presence is attenuated and the past shows through. Many aptitudes such as shooting never ...

Residual Rubbernecking
September 23, 2012
Press the key you wish to define now. Later, outside, you can say the slosh is softer this year, or mercy loops its own trail, mucking through the triumphant pillars of mastery—moment’s solace, forfeiture’s plenitude. I’d wave my hand maybe four or five times before ...

Interior
September 22, 2012
1. The bleached corpse of the afternoon mutes the surface of my window. Pinned to the wall, a peacock feather pales quietly in its light. Minutes trickle by. Outside, a man presses his face against my door and whispers. Frustrated cars roar and slide around the building. The day ...

Ballad
Zane slaves over a rock ballad, tears on cheek, flared mauve chaps, bullion lips.   two takes, has cigar, calls it a Mayflower nickel, wages, an emotional pilgrimage.   not enough, take ten.   pauses for recall, popular remainders and pulse, a twinkie that belts ...

What She Does Not Understand
September 22, 2012
That I am walking home in a city so old its stone shares substance with its darkness. That loneliness sinks leaden and still older through both. That my throat aches dense to stretch and die strangled on her body. That it cannot swallow her whole.   That towers and walls ...

Song of Her Vomit
September 22, 2012
Out of Victoria endlessly puking, Out of her mockingbird’s throat, the musical splashing, Out of her full-mooned midnight, Over the toilet to the pipes beyond, where the workmen taking their breaks wander’d alone, drinking coffee, smoking, Down from her toothy jawline, Up ...

With This Poem All Things Are Possible
This poem has been sent to you for aesthetic pleasure. The original is in England, but millions worldwide read it faithfully each day. It is not a virus, but an opportunity to gain aesthetic pleasure and pass it along to others. To do this you must pay for and distribute twenty ...

Nocturne
August 29, 2012
I’ve been shopping for years, but tonight the shelves are empty and glare beneath fluorescent lights.   The night manager loads unmarked cans into a brown bag for no one who is there.   I ask him about the dearth of goods upon which I have come to depend.   He ...

Bonny Boy
August 29, 2012
Ken ye na the wee laddie gaun sprinklin’ ay, hear ye na his trickie tinklin’ be ye so auld ye na hae an inkling hard abeigh the sink eyes closed sae ye na see them twinkling as he gaed a drink?   queer, na like other laddie boys who fain work not their wicked ...

Democratic Vistas
August 22, 2012
The narrator was shot by the sniper he was describing and I quickly picked up his pen. What luck, I thought, to be sitting up here in the narrator’s tower where the parking lots look like chalkboards and the characters scurry around or fall down and die as I design it. Then I ...

Honey
You opened your mouth and I let myself in breath … lips … tongue shirts and keys and couch Next to you I dreamt of you   You opened your mouth and said I do Yes, my darling, I did too Yes, I remember that   You opened your mouth screaming—but I was There Remember ...

What a Kiss Could Involve
And then I started to kiss from nothing, out of nowhere, for some kind of passing thrill like eavesdropping or trying on a stranger’s underwear, And you did it, too, everybody did it, we could see them in the bushes, under veils of leaves, exchanging small hollow oaths then ...