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Baffler Archives: Poems

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Can you believe this notice
Can you believe this notice in the middle of a seating and dining porch it’s literally made for loitering   We have this seating area but NO ONE CAN USE IT!!!   But I guess for most folks it’s only loitering if they’ve been lingering for hours For me it’s ...

Low Flight
Who prescribes that with wings spread one must fly high Low flight is also a flight With wind rustling like birds’ chirps And wheels speeding like shooting stars The meal delivery note attached to a takeout In clear black and white symbolizes urgency Like a legal document and ...

Arc Length
God forbid I should try to improve myself, says the bitter jobber whose family truck is stolen outside the workshop where we are bonding steel with argon gas.   I’m learning to weld and getting burned constantly. I am fidgety during the chemistry lesson. Each half hour I ...

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, ...