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Poetry
A space for poems, spoken pieces, and collections shaped by pressure, memory, fracture, and feeling.
Browse by collection, spoken work, theme, or recency.
Dream-logic, fabulism, and mythic visitations. Reality bends, symbols speak, and images carry more than one meaning. The goal is wonder and unease in equal measure.
A surreal speculative poem about a child, erased play, and a bureaucratic world that turns memory, language, and belonging into terms of service.
A mythic fall poem about shame, grievance and self-built hell: a ruined leader refuses an open moral threshold and enters the garden through its service current.
A surreal, image-led poem of joined hands, burning flower heads and a distant moon.
A surreal coastal poem about inherited exits, impossible thresholds, and a key that begins to feel usable without opening anything.
A sun-drenched free-verse poem where a sleeping body, a fan, and an orange room leave behind a halo of heat, colour, and absence.
A surreal poem of a woman and a serpent-knot, where darkness becomes a measure of perception, pressure, and withheld light.
A sensory free-verse poem about a photograph's missing weather, tracing heat, salt, an exposed ankle, and memory beyond the visible frame.
A precise repair poem in which a leaking red pump resists mending, leaving pressure and a blue pilot light to mark the flaw that remains.
A surreal free-verse poem in which a pink feather boa becomes a tightening dress-code ritual, leaving one disobedient scale to hold the light.
A satirical free-verse poem about CAPTCHA tests, workplace efficiency, and a body refusing to become data inside a failing human-capital system.
A technical free-verse poem where a damaged circuit is repaired without erasing its scars, turning current, carbon, and heat into a study of survival.
A spare surreal poem of blue sand, a rooted flower and an untouched hollow, where thirst, worship and absence gather at the edge of dawn.
A lush surreal poem of glass, fruit, flowers and a forgotten mouth, where polished beauty breaks open and weather enters the body.
A surreal canyon-edge poem where boots, dust and a watchful rim turn vertigo into a strange conversation with the drop.
A surreal free-verse poem where a figure sits beneath a cloud for a face, balancing vulnerability, identity, and weather on a rooftop of red tiles.
Where my face should be, there’s a cloud over me. A lyrical poem about disconnection, longing, and finding your way back to yourself.
A memory-haunted poem of sugared rooms, a silent red telephone and birthday light, where absence blooms into a listening that never quite ends.
A surreal poem of seam-lit creatures, hallway haze and a translation card, where gentleness guides a slow crossing between one self and another.
A surreal cleansing poem of moth-silk gloves, ribbons of wax and a room left spacious again, where burden is returned to its rightful weight.
A surreal poem of an open stone book, liquid wax and creatures between worlds, where questions are answered through refraction, space and release.
A surreal poem of a clay pit, a burning ladder and a hand-lit sun, where fire and solitude become a private cosmology.
A surreal poem of appliance-language, tuned affection and a lexicon that bends devices toward care, where convenience risks erasing human ambiguity.
A speculative poem of shared courtyards, QR codes and permission-grown fruit, where community must choose between consent and convenience.
A speculative love poem of smart homes, archived voices and a borrowed heart, where intimacy survives as cached traces across machines and memory.
Poetry themes
Each stream gathers poems by mood, music, pressure, and the kind of attention the piece asks for.
Poems that walk the fault lines: grief, rupture, war, urban grit, and the mythic underbelly of the everyday. Expect charged images, stark music, and hard turns that don’t tidy the mess so much as name it.
Editor’s picks and special spotlights: the poems, sequences, and craft notes we think deserve your front-row gaze. Rotating highlights, seasonal themes, and one-off gems that show the range of our community.
Poems grouped by this theme.
Where verse meets melody. Poems arranged as songs, chants, and soundscapes—complete with audio players, lyric sheets, and credits for collaborators. Expect live takes, studio mixes, and experiments that let the poem sing in new registers.
Field notes of the inner and outer world: weather, seasons, land, and the quiet revolutions of thought. Lyrical attention, ecological awareness, and a contemplative pace define this stream.
Wit with teeth. Irony, parody, and mischief aimed at power, pretence, and the status quo. Formal play and punchy line breaks welcome; the laugh should leave a bruise.
Work of resilience and renewal: poems about survival, kinship, faith (in any form), and the long arc of becoming. Clear cadence, steady light, and endings that open rather than preach.
Dream-logic, fabulism, and mythic visitations. Reality bends, symbols speak, and images carry more than one meaning. The goal is wonder and unease in equal measure.
Poetry in isiZulu, alongside careful translations where offered. A home for imagery, izibongo (praise poetry), and contemporary voices that carry rhythm and story. Submissions may appear bilingual to welcome wider readers.
65 entries across poetry.
23 entries across poetry.
1 entries across poetry.
1 entries across poetry.
2 entries across poetry.
1 entries across poetry.
Poetry began here as play with words, fragments, and unlikely connections. Over time it became a record of feeling, then a way of making sense without forcing neat explanations too early.
Some pieces are more instinctive. Some are more controlled. None of them are interested in pretending the human experience arrives tidy.
These poems are not written to hand over a single fixed meaning. They are written to hold image, pressure, contradiction, and the parts of experience that resist summary.
Read them slowly or read them in a rush. Read them in sequence if you want to notice how the voice shifts over time. Read them out of order if you want the cleaner shock of recognition.
If a poem leaves you with a clearer feeling rather than a cleaner answer, it has done its job.
Some poems also live in voice.
Where a spoken version exists, it should feel like an extension of the page rather than a separate performance layer. The voice is there to carry the pressure of the line, not distract from it.
Collections gather poems by atmosphere, season, pressure, or recurring thread.
Enter a collection when you want a more sustained mood than the main archive offers, or when you want to stay with a particular register a little longer.