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Baffler Archives: Poems

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At Lookout
February 28, 2022
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
February 28, 2022
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
February 28, 2022
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)
February 28, 2022
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)
February 28, 2022
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
February 28, 2022
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
February 28, 2022
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 ...

Juneau Spring
January 10, 2022
In Alaska I slept in a bed on stilts, one arm pressed against the ice feathered window, the heat on high, sweat darkening the collar of my cotton thermals. I worked hard to buy that bed, walked towards it when the men in the booths were finished crushing hundred dollar ...

The Bond
for S.H.   The dry August air reeks of wood and ash and the smoke plumes leaving the rocky bowl of the San Gabriels sink to kiss the lawn.   The dogs bark themselves hoarse, their frightened black throats as charred as the wounded hillsides. No refuge for ...