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Baffler Archives: Poems

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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 ...

Ectoslavian Chant
Be leery of the unstabable man on the fast tractor. There are plenty of people walking across fields in early winter, with only one arm, looking for their high school class ring.   My wife lay ill for weeks. I opened every window to let the dust and moonshine in, and she ...

No Checkmate
You moved upon me, White Queen, with advantage across the black and red web a stinging albino spider self-proclaimed white widow who pales charcoal pawns unhorses ebony knights dismantles impregnable obsidian rooks sins with the dark bishop beheads my raven haired queen until, ...

Plant Trip
Your steps echo in a vast hall, grey lit and empty except for some plastic seats. Photographs cluster on a blackwashed cinder-block wall: “B-36” “Atlas” and “B-58”. Try to chat with the other recruit. Like you he sits in a pale seat and wears a navy ...

I Was Goya but Now Pretty Cows
I was Goya but now pretty cows in vague comprehension roam regal the once catacombed earth; the platforms of chided performers jut bare and up comes Lazarus one rainy spring moment to bewail his fellow’s follies; seizing the pulpit he laments and shrieks–pleads politic to ...

To Little Debbie
Child of angelic sweetness, can it be that Little Debbie has a snack for me?   No baker, but a hungry bachelor, I wander through the bright convenience store   encumbered with a six-pack and a quart of drinkables, when something stops me short:   an icon of ...

Continental Divide
She lags below, as I press on, climb, up the mountain towards Emerald Lake. A coyote sounds on the stone. My limbs freeze. “Is this where the water flows back?” “Not yet,” I say, frustrated. “Soon.” She itches for the smog-choked valley Where dissipated men meet, ...

Undisputed Master of the Yard
A poet pretends to speak for the season: A boudoir blooming everywhere, the lovely patina cracked. And the landscape does not transcend a boy with muddy socks yanking small leaves, ripping an insect. He tucks it in his pocket and whispers in the face of all life, the ...