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Baffler Archives: Poems

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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” ...

Foodborne
Apportioned severed fowl all twined and trussed.   The Powell high school cigarette behind the ball field, beside the cemetery, inside the ash cloud of urn and un-earn.   Cartography of butcher paper stains. And where the creases have gone juicy soft.   Imagine ...

Further Education
The last mouse left in the experiment has failed to figure out the pattern of activity that releases the food pellets over the course of what seems like a week but is in fact fifteen years, far longer than the typical lifespan of a mouse, but of course   many factors are ...

Interior Design
December 12, 2022
The last phone booth in the world took up residence in our living room. I liked to hide there, sometimes to cry or sleep. Other times, to read news   about the war. I never tried to work in there. I didn’t grade essays or sort receipts for taxes. The phone didn’t work, ...

love just don’t fade away
I said I’m proud of you , he said the same I said what’s that missing from , what’s that hail and will I wake from these visions of defection to change them in time to change them ? to puncture that kind of gun wave gun lean gun warning crisis call that eschatological ...

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 ...