Poems for the Unemployed: ad1.doc
The███████████ Company is the ████████████
██████████████████████████████world█
████████████ and ███████████the ...
Baffler Archives: Poems
Columns
Poems for the Unemployed: ap1.doc
[ ] blood runs green and the [ ] one i will let let me / i will let it run me good and green into its pockets until i don’t run at all / i will simply fall in / i am a whole entire [ ] but i can be yours for a small monthly fee [ ] it could all ...
Vivian Maier Considers Heaven from a Bench in Rogers Beach Park Chicago
In Heaven nobody will be alone
In Heaven except for me and nobody
Nobody calls nobody comes
My nobody expands across the country
The way a parachute expands across
The sky it does if you’re right under ...
At Lookout
Men’s knees convulse as if buckling
from the weight of music. This is not the Pegasus.
This is San Francisco. The tenderness of evening
is lost in the afternoon. It’s Sunday, but still,
those knees bend and buck like a crush
of newborn deer freshly dropped from the ...
Morning
There is a neighbor drying the dishes in a wire rack
each plate filed under another prong. Open. Filled. Open. Vacancy.
In the next apartment, a pile of shells. The spirals exercised
under the pressures of sand returns the hollow to a net of light. ...
Untitled
Dear _______________,
I am writing you this letter because you are in pain. This is what you tell me when we speak over the phone. I am writing to you as a record that someone has taken the time to write you a letter. You are in the future and I am in the past. It is 6pm ...
Without Feeling (Catallus 96)
If, taciturn, your two graves smile
at my shock, for now not grief,
it’s as if those silted lips revive
the hours spent with me. Tonight,
a quake across not mine, but all
your friends, whose faces shade,
and in the weird you left for ...
Fault (Catallus 102)
Leaks drip out of lips that part, from a copse where secrets rot,
churning to a knot that needs untying by a friend.
Split a digraph:
Scantly ape the palm one hides to shake, and cup the eyes,
obstruct the mouth, and plug the ear the weaker party rambled.
Frenzy
after Sylvia Plath and Władysław Podkowiński
Hey horse, hey friend,
I like chrysalises. We need more tenderness,
not less. Emerging from a foreign field,
my neck in your arms. Pale arms, holding a black-berried set
of eyes, holding me. I loved ...
American Elegy
I know no music for how a country should end.
I no longer want to be pretty for you. Not even for
myself. If I must watch you burn while performing
my own arias, then I will watch you burn with my
throat. If I must sing another world to live, then my
tongue arrives earlier than ...
Excerpts from A Different Distance
Across the street, a
girl stands lengthily at the
window, smoking and
looking at empty sidewalks,
sun-soaked on April first.
I wished the tourists
would disappear. Now they’re gone.
Watch what you wish for!
In purdah, in quarantine,
I dice one more ...
Excerpts from A Different Distance (2)
This time, winter comes
to Paris on stockinged feet,
no fuss, no fireworks,
until she’s layering breath
with frost and the pipes with gnarls.
In Vellayani,
my parents greet their wedding
anniversary
by bracing their windows and
ears for Cyclone ...