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Baffler Archives: Poems

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From Things I Have Made a Fiction
I wrote a book where I tried to make sense of my life, or where I tried to distinguish my life from my dreams, because in the moments just after waking, my dream life and my waking life were starting to feel confused. In the past few years, while I tried to write my dreams down, ...

Pt. Reyes
January 05, 2026
Drove to where the trees turn to ocean air and vista, golden hills and old crag, water churning in the far, low distances. M brought enough to microdose and we chewed dried persimmon to help with the aftertaste: sort of chemical but earthy. And the elk we’d come to see watched ...

[His ordinary bedtime questions …]
January 05, 2026
His ordinary bedtime questions—why she never pierced her nose, whether she might ever like a tattoo, to color or shave her hair— fill her with a rage she knows is dread in drag. Whoever she is being compared to is sending tendrils up the bricks and to their room. Stepsister ...

From Instruments for a New Navigation
January 05, 2026
  ‘The most tremendous and compelling emotion we possesses is the one that forces us to look, to know, if we can, to see.’       Switch on the lights  late days  you are right to underscore the reasonableness of our ...

Tongue Delirium
October 27, 2025
The world’s fats & wild offerings! Radial exhalations, shadow & silk!   All that rushes through your twinned globes, heating the irises.   Keep every phoneme fungible, without weight.   Swimming field, no anchor.   Let your cries move as thunder ...

Top Ten Reasons to Dislike List Poems
October 27, 2025
Feels like a grocery list. Too many nuts can mess with your tummy. Cutting out syntax from a piece is cutting off its ability to breathe in time. Grind Culture. There was once a child who tried to list everything he saw throughout the day, Parsnips, milk (2%), sushi rice, ...

Self vs Rogue Island
Put your hands up, says the island. I look around but it is still just me and the island. I meekly raise my hands a little, slightly higher than before—is that enough? All the way up, you little nitwit. This foul-mouthed island is nothing like the ones in the ads. It’s also ...

Glass Octopus
the mesopelagic touches the underside of a boat my father dreamed he built I turned his fortune into a sturdy vessel that churned through countless waves to the place where everything is equidistant then in the chamber of a lowered diving bell through thick glass suddenly ...

Poem
September 02, 2025
Light burns the books of light. They hang a black wreath on the page, a door snowed shut.   Stars spaced like cries at night, the words of wind in fire’s ink, fill up the lungs’ black skies.   Eyes in the words shine back. The voice in letters like light in an ...

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September 02, 2025
“My body I give to my dear friend Doctor Southwood Smith to be disposed of in a manner hereinafter mentioned . . .” —from the will of Jeremy Bentham, 30th of May, 1832 Sam, I am in a box watching the centuries pass. There’s a round object on the floor between my ...