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Baffler Archives: Poems

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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 ...

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, ...