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Baffler Archives: Poems

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After a Vase Broken by Marcel Proust
November 01, 2021
What we know, we come to know by its undoing: there is no permanent   exhibit here. Like August stars, we offer temporary light, our lives measured   in latitudes of loss, the longest distance between any two points in time.   And, errant, we are covetous: the ...

Excerpts from “Mandarin Primer”
September 06, 2021
The Radicals   Placed at the hub of language, they draw sap from ground and ancestors to nourish the phrases placed on sheets of paper, matching matter to manner. Complete unto itself, its soul vibrating to one single sound, China turned its back on the world during the ...

Mother
September 06, 2021
I miss the ego goo of youth hot peaches in a bowl   so yielding I felt tender toward my tick that plushy bug who stuck and sucked the cold place on my neck who filled up on what filled me    without shame The doctor tweezed him off I said   No no   ...

Water Tower
September 06, 2021
Industrial mushroom highway moon pearl rimmed indigo in sunset’s glut of orange   dwarfing the yard of auto parts and plastic bags and bulldozers howling to raze the town, and windows prickled with interstate light and couples who fight in the basement so noise does not ...

Pablo Tac (1822–1841)
“Thus we lived among the woods until merciful God freed us of these miseries through Father Peyri and seven Spanish soldiers.   In the Mission, the Fernandino Father is like a king. He has his pages, majordomos, musicians, and horses by the thousand.   They made ...

Excerpts from “In Pieces”
September 06, 2021
Tone Deep   No sound is less than a sound or more. But music keeps us from hearing each one by itself. Says John Cage. It is a pity. No mother tongue unless a mother. Or many books demanding we enter their superb monotony. What tongue would not allow us to say you in the ...

more than sex, I miss the movies
 The dreams of lonely boys start there, hemmed with glass and splashed with light and distance.     The screen feels too close in my bedroom as I boot up a romantic drama while I roll a pair of cousins     and I smoke them in the ...

A Perichoresis
In the South we raise a Godhead through questioning What city, what ward, what street?   Houston: a midwife, a first kiss, a celibate sky New Orleans: my father and mother return Baltimore: an endless bay that carries my son   or another way to say any port in the ...

Not Blind
No it isn’t. But love took one of my eyes for itself, love had vision before birth, did discuss with me the accuracy of what transpires in lenses.   And then it went blind—slowly soaked us up from behind a veil, and we couldn’t see it.   A deaf air said to ...

The Correct Approach
Eloquently they spoke, those ancients— briefly, and with a shine. Their thoughts had little wings attached to them, like Hermes’. (You remember Hermes? You don’t remember Hermes. So, see they have no wings, these your thoughts.) As for ancients, they could care less if ...

with walter benjamin in queens
You can’t make a new man but you can kill old ones Walter Benjamin in Moscow 1927 noted posters exhorting the masses with the slogan “Time Is Money” attributed to Lenin the only god the lazy Russians masses pretended to listen to but did not no matter how big Majakovski ...