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Baffler Archives: Poems

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10/11
It was Lisa’s birthday    She turned 143   we celebrated with pretzels and watched the Descendants of man fishing [a] manmade lake   The water green    the sky tender, night trains. strawberries.   wind-stunted ...

heathkit tv 1980
what my father made and gave me, nouns:   transistor, fastening, capacitor. he was a sort   of sorcerer, wizard at building, his mind   a sleek machine of memory, rebuilt   from youthful chaos and some suffering   we didn’t discuss, just ...

The Javelina
I saw the javelina from afar It looked familiar    like a neighbor eating rocks at the edge of the grass,    framed by the grass and several barrels of patriotic flowers   The javelina’s front leg was ...

Come, Calamity
Render tender the shoots of evening, let us in the lettuce   light, fitful as fish pumping fistfuls of razored air, jagged   saws: tsk-tsk, cut-cut. Gleaners in the gloaming—fuck that.   I was starving and far too far from any lavender heroics.   There’s ...

Condemned to Irrelevance
Ah, how I would like every word of mine to maintain a double meaning, and all the elements of my verses to be optional! Instead, this is not the case: I spoke seriously with a clean and neatly dressed apostle of the S.D.S. in a dining hall at Queen’s College. This spoiled kid ...

The Proverbs of Heck
The body at poolside confesses its snacks. The office of litigation has wider views than the kitchen of charity. Gauze curtains admit a desire of sight. Better a dinner at Herb’s than the noise of the kids. Mop and sponge restore nothing to the bottle. Enclose in census files ...

Mi’e’raj (The Ascension)
the ladder rising to the sky (after the soil seethes up the waters calm down) this is not Jacob’s ladder   Mount Ahır, Engizek . . . Öksüz . . . Berit . . . Zeytun Springs . . . Blood River Bridge . . . Yeşilgöz Gorge from the deep comes the resolve of the upsurge in ...

Canada! I’m Sorry!
March 01, 2023
I am trying to step on the moon but my boss is calling to yell at me. He says you didn’t think enough about Canada. You were supposed to write about everything, and you wrote about everything but Canada. The place where he is saying this is inside my phone, which is inside my ...

sometimes i think i’m falling apart
“To many, SPAM is the epitome of horror in a can, a filthy amalgam of discarded orts of industrial animal slaughter and sinister chemical additives that require a doctorate in chemistry—or necromancy—to decipher . . . a noxious culinary miscreant.” —Robert Ji-Song ...

the myth of the end of the world
for Lewis Freedman     ok so let there be a pedal point, in thought a sustained tone that other thoughts can come and go   gutbucket back to thread and thread to fiber   spirit of the shack   i tell Lewis “well i also want something other than time” ...