Skip to content

Baffler Archives: Poems

Columns

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 ...

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 ...