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Baffler Archives: Poems

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Remember, We’re in the Duck Lot
Sunday after Church the parking lot fills and people drive circles to save those 50 steps to the mall entrance. When peasants gathered Sundays around Notre Dame it might’ve been like this–what they found is what we get: Madonnas and images of a heaven where everything’s ...

Learning English
Ginta: Excuse me, that is your cat? Sanita: Hm.… G: I ask: That is your cat? S: Yes, yes. G: Whose? You unknown? S: Who? Where? G: That was only moment. S: Who? G: That self. S: You over event the yesterday. G: no S: What about you? G: Only about today. S: Who is happen? G: ...

Freddy’s Lament
I took a swim in the sea. my life started over.   my boner lasted longer. my appetite swelled.   my hunting skills were sharper. although I never hunt.   I wanted the hurricane-watch software package advertised on tv.   I called the toll free number: sold ...

A Dress
its warm bodice and intricate lace tells nothing of its past which I know from a black and white sign hung on an outlet rack. “smoke damaged garments, price reduced.” a bubbly clerk, “from a building fire in the L.A. riots; they smell fine.” “much sweeter than ...

Dancing to Silent Movies
[contributor id=”598″] An old man slumps before the screen where flickering light plays. Empty film tapdances at reel’s end– ta-lac, ta-lac, ta-lac, ta-lac, until stiff fingers fumble with the switch, labor to rewind the worn print. When he is ready, film ...

Nautical
June 13, 2012
Other people’s lives sink and swell around you, lapping at your shifting rim, leaving their debris. Billowing on every side, they rush and then recede. They wash across your beaches. You feel a slow erosion. Shoring up your sea walls, you study the morning sky. You listen to ...

Coming Back to Odell
    From the soft ridge looking down, the four-bedroom colonials are straighter           than ever. They finally locked up Leo Simonetti,           for indecent exposure last week, pressed slacks gathered at his ankles, clutching his hard-on in Miss ...

Visiting the Grandmother in Pittsburgh
I travelled past foundries withered into dust and boarded, tired caffeine stops reclaimed now by the ivy holding an original lien on the property, (taverns with neon Iron City signs were the only places doing much business now) past mountains mined carelessly, left to bleed clay ...

To a Young Person
O come, young person, come, my restless teen, from ranch, split-level and colonial, hop in the wagon: come see and seen to wander the suburban shopping mall.   There, in the flickering fluorescent glare, beside an artificial waterfall, we’ll while away the hours without a ...

The Old Ones
June 13, 2012
The old ones, the old ones are coming, keep coming, by cane and wheelchair, their teeth in glasses, their thinning hair, their seizures and strokes, their stained underwear, hard now of hearing (their ears full of hair), complaining of pains, medicaid, medicare. They are coming, ...

Pandora’s Diving
piercing water with a breath poised beneath three hundred silver bubbles wavering and separating into thousands of aerated marbles upwards sailing past the cold surface to feed the greening leaves   Pandora’s diving, the aqualung her box, unavoidably opened to let the ...