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Baffler Archives: Poems

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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 ...

Primal Facades
A bus passes on my way into town and I shout at its passengers, “we aren’t well assembled!” My head quivers. I stride carefully past merchants drinking coffee and selling magazines on the sidewalk’s stark eternal lines. I can’t talk to them. I’m overwhelmed by the ...

Goddess
June 09, 2012
There, that is where she resides She floats there amid a sea of shit and refuse, coursing subcutaneous in the veins of the city. On her back perhaps, arms outstretched in mockery of our familiar savior, her cool nails dredging slicks she weaves her garland crown. Glowing ...

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 ...