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Baffler Archives: Poems

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Places I Hid
In the dryer. I could see a wide circle of my mother’s apron. She pretended loudly not to know I was there, and finally reached in to tickle me. I tried to slam the door on her arm in my joyous panic.   In the niche between my old bed and my bookshelf, with six Playmobil ...

Profession
I The discipline that requires one to sit through sift through the flickering fakery the monotonous monotony of Birth of a Nation more than half a time must be chafed beneath and ultimately unsubmitted to. Art history is a nightmare from which I’m trying to awake. II I hate ...

Widow
A widow combs her wirey flaxen hair and her dark eyes flow coldly beneath a wilted brow, her tome breathes heavily as she sits on a raft, curled in a warm magenta cup, a rose’s basin, teaching scents, burning lessons, scratching her life on a flower’s soft wall, rubbing a ...

Poseidon’s Lover En Route
Beneath ice, She undulates, Such carefully timed rifts, Oxygen fills her soul Dreams and deepening skies, Beasts roam daily, Cold midnight sleeps. Suns and cheers urge on every surging wake, momentum and roiling seas, toes merge as leaves, a flood, daffodil stems, crystallizing ...

Alone, Late at Night in Vermont
The crickets croon their natural chorus & though they must be in the agony of relentless desire like so many now, their soliciting wing song is strangely calming.   The trees are like embracing figures in a negative who can’t be made out. A bird singing from one of ...

The Pillsbury Dough Man
The Pillsbury Dough Man has a workshop up in the sky— After hours only. When lights are turned off below, In factories and shops And the blazing sun, fatigued and hot, retires The whistle blows and the oven is ignited. The Pillsbury Dough Man emerges fresh and cool— Up in ...

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 ...