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Baffler Archives: Poems

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Landfall
  You were tall-masted in the breeze, sloop-rigged on the day of your first landing. I blessed your coming cautiously, as was my way, and offered you pearls from the deepest shelf. Your hair was shorter than mine, and I was comfortable in the modern coat you lent me. My ...

Marty, Joey and Jesse
The boy kings cruise in Marty’s Camaro, body tattooed with primer scars. The real story lies under the hood: nothing but polished chrome bought part by part as weekly money was pocketed. Jesse’s riding shotgun, a bright city navigator on nightclub patrol, searchin ...

Twilight of Idylls
Persephone’s brow like brimstone and mica lingers longer to await a bovine tug, robes fall around her, naked flies dance circles from her hair with strength to rule swarming trojans, felled likewise, bush-hogged —forests are cleared for the mall, collapsed and mauled, a ...

Pinweelz
A sclerotic passage through indigenous tunnels, when in forever’s milk-white atonality, a hemorrhaging thought still meanders, fructifying, a lap top terminal rests as plastic synergy, arias wailing beneath mango thunderheads, swelling til explosions spill over sticky ...

and yet I will send the nude photos
Suffer victim! bury your face between my eroding shores! crave my seaweed suckled rocks! thrill the creamy white mud! Suck the heat from my lips Catch my miserable breasts! frame by frame Think of my cavernous shores! frame by frame don’t forget to touch the ...

Dual Yul Century
May 30, 2012
(as sung by the New Century Singers) Euell Gibbons always symbolized to me That man can live and eat naturally So how’s there any hope for a guy like you or me When Euell Gibbons died from the wrong part of a tree Guess we’ll find out in the new century Yul Brynner ...

Simile
Just as your toes are warming up beneath the covers, the wife whispers “Darling, America wants to come in out of the cold,” so you grumble through the frigid kitchen to the door, and there sits this orange cat looking all matted and filthy from who-knows-what rubbish ...

Bedroom Scene
  By the bureau you swam into black cloth, belted red. Perfect mourning marked with fire; sorrow for blood shed long ago in some other bed. You dressed without looking at me, not daring the glance that might have held you for a stammering moment. Three steps in stockings ...