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
Mara Voss · September 21, 2026 · On poetry
They said the photograph would kill the painting, and the painting leaned against the wall and waited. They said the radio would kill the newspaper, the screen would kill the radio, the feed
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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.