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Baffler Archives: Poems

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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 ...

Excerpt from “The Calf-Eyed”
Translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet   1 A milk offering was made to the gods every morning and every evening. A small amount of foaming fresh milk was suddenly poured in between the planks of the cowshed floor from the flower-patterned enamel pail. It seemed ...

Circe, Pig’s Heart
Translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet   1a The gods are called the examiners of hearts and kidneys, I don’t know why. When my father cut out the pig’s heart, at first he placed it in his palm, lifting it up, appraising it and guessing the weight, and he ...

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 ...