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Baffler Archives: Poems

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Cascade
This has been the season we splayed in rooms rewarded to us for an interlude   by the ruse of others, well and coldly lit. You played a long,   sometimes fitful song while my insides turned within me, the tissue   outside its place, blood the wrong color. Ache has ...

Sadacre
October 03, 2022
Your face is standing near the door of my sadness, inside a house made of nothing, pressing against the plexiglass   of the shooting range of my depression, in goggles & determination the surround sound of the bullseye target, the bullet of   amnesia, the grenade ...

Then
October 03, 2022
There was the day before that and the day before that, concatenating your sense of being absent design. And the day before that you were sent a tube you presumed for breathing. Had you bought it? Nigh impossible remembering anything resembling intention. You held it. Gentian ...

Setting
The aural chronicle of this town is written in jukebox codes and corn miles, the wind   shifting with the harvest and in the bar back entrance. Everyone here is young in a way,   proud of their coldness in another, and even so, fixed into the deer bush with the ...

Spock’s Brain
is lost somewhere in the galaxy, stolen by the terrible androids of Omicron 9. Space aliens, dangerous sirens, libidinal and lust-crazy with weaponized utility bracelets.    (Screenplays of the 60s.)    Bugs Bunny—aka the Masked Marauder—doesn’t live in ...

Adriatic
1. What we mean is always on the other side. Aeneas to Italy, Diocletian to Dalmatia, endless ferrying, wine, wanderers, words.   2. It is like that in our town, trees lacey with new snow, the sun waiting. The book lies open on the table, poem, painted cover, body leaping ...

Be More
1. “Dead and gone,” you might think. But it’s not that simple.   Now the dead get jobs answering FAQs, like   “Is someone here?” and “Is anybody there?”   2. “Be more recognizable!” tweets Surveillance Inc.,   like we were all slightly out ...

Strategies
Governments vie on black markets for zero-day exploits.   Teen models rub brown lipstick under their eyes to achieve sleep-deprivation chic.   “Every so often people go through something where they get sick of beauty.”   *   Even thrill seekers are ...

Shake Test
Small rockets crash every day, at science fairs, in parking lots, at White Sands Missile Range where a grad student launches her own nervous breakdown. Scientists cry all the time. They cry in the clean room and the tears wet their masks, and they can’t blow their ...

Poem, Polemic
all like me not writing back to nobody. Pa say anybody, no mind who, address you with less than respect, you not to privilege with neither attention nor reply. same like I not speaking for those who have no voice. is not suppose we suppose to be telling story from God make Adam ...

Shakuntala
Maybe it come in the blood.   Poet child or Eastern labourer in me love magic names appellations to start spirits abracadabras open sesames.   I know I know this Shakuntala. But is wait I wait till memory serve her genius up conjurer with numbers miracle accuracies to ...

Husbands
My house, my bed, my husbands —Savages   O dream   I live in which I dream Whose dreams   I have and failing tried Not harming them to live inside Too often making   like a pet dog sudden- ly unfamiliar killing a wild rabbit en- raged for no reason ...