A journal of short lyric poetry
New verse published each week — on salt, distance, quiet houses and the soft hour before a city begins.
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This week
Ilse Marchand · October 9, 2026 · Migration
Over the estuary at six, the sky practises its leaving — a grey rope pulled taut from the north, two hundred wings agreeing on one direction. I have never once seen a bird look back.
Read the whole poemArchive
A poem about what poetry is for — and a plain-spoken guide to why verse survives every technology that was supposed to replace it.
A poem addressed to Dickinson, Whitman, Keats, Rossetti and Frost — plus the lines that made each of them famous.
The garden after rain is not clean; it is only more itself.
A harbour wakes slowly, and so do we — salt on the window, light on the rope.
Leave one lamp burning. Rooms remember the people who forgot them.
The orchard counts its losses out loud, and calls the sound weather.
Distance is not the space between us but the time it takes to mean it.
Memory keeps a hallway open: doors on both sides, none of them locked.
Even the city has a soft hour: the street clears its throat and begins.