Poetry: Short Stories to Read

Age gets serious, but I never will.

by Lucy_bloom

A 17-year-old who has just moved out reflects on society's expectations around work, money, and success, setting against them a counter-model of lightness, spontaneity, and genuine joy. The text is a youthful manifesto against taking status and possessions too seriously, and a plea to truly live rather than merely exist.

City Night

by Lucy_bloom

The text describes a quiet city night from a first-person perspective, with lanterns, moonlight, and cricket chirping creating an atmospheric backdrop between stillness and urban vitality. The narrator perceives the stories behind lit windows and finds relaxation and peace in the night. It is a lyrical snapshot of urban stillness.

The Half-Life of Prayer

by Chenxi93

Propulsion Magistrate Soo kneels alone in the engine compartment of a deep-space vessel and folds her hands for the first time in eleven years – not out of belief, but from a need to address the vastness around her. The story meditates on the boundary between scientific rationality and spiritual longing, weaving in memories of her mother's altar and a half-remembered poem. In the minutes before a scheduled burn, she arrives at a quiet, wordless understanding of what prayer might actually be.

Inventory of a Textile Museum After Closing Time

by L_Balazova

A lyrical narrator takes inventory of a textile museum after hours, but the ostensibly clinical cataloguing becomes a meditation on anonymous labor, collective memory, and the quiet dignity of unrecorded lives. Each object – a shuttle worn smooth by use, a missing bobbin, a child's bonnet – opens onto stories never written down, while the inventory itself trails off unfinished. The piece moves elegantly between documentation and elegy, between what can be counted and what cannot.

The Archivist of Phobos

by Farhad.Akhavan

Maryam, the sole remaining scientist at a station orbiting Phobos, discovers a mysterious cylinder on the moon's surface after fourteen months of isolation caused by a distant war. The object bears an inscription in ancient Pahlavi script with a message of comfort across time. The story weaves together profound solitude with an unexpected moment of trans-historical human connection.

What the Ice Does Before It Breaks

by ErikL

A lyric prose poem follows a pond through the full arc of freezing and thaw, from November's first skin of ice to April's last dissolving plates. A narrator who is both field scientist and poet reads the ice as a language, finding in its seasonal transformation an unspoken metaphor for endurance, silence, and change. The abrupt, incomplete final line deepens the poem's sense of unresolved becoming.

What the Beekeeper's Widow Knows About Silence

by MansourAlQahtani

A beekeeper's widow grieves in her own quiet way, rejecting communal mourning rituals in favor of solitary dawn visits to her late husband's hives. In the hum and warmth of the bees she finds a wordless prayer and the slowly-forming understanding that loss is not absence but a pressure that holds heat long after its source is gone. The story closes mid-sentence, as if the thought — like grief — cannot quite be finished.

Poem for a Language I'm Losing

by Adriana

The lyrical voice traces the gradual loss of Portuguese across three generations – from a mother who still counts in her native tongue, to the speaker's own estrangement, to a daughter who was never taught the language. Through quiet domestic images, the poem conveys a deep, wordless grief over a lost linguistic home. It closes with the image of water slipping through fingers – a loss recognized too late.

What Stays in the Hospital Room

by Hannelore

A lyrical text depicts keeping vigil at a mother's hospital bedside – the mechanical beeping, still hands, counting ceiling tiles. The narrator waits for the mother to wake and call them by their real name, while life outside continues indifferently. Everything distills into the realization that love sometimes means nothing more than staying.

What the Ice Still Knows

by Lars

A lyrical poem about the retreating ice of a fjord, told through a child's memories and a father's embodied knowledge of the land. It meditates on the loss of indigenous wisdom and language that disappears alongside the natural world it once described. Writing becomes a final act of witnessing — not to save the ice, but to remember that it once sang.

Time Signature for a Sourdough

by Cormac

An Irish baker and former musician processes his band's breakup in a refrain-driven poem, finding in the rhythm of bread-making a new, quieter measure for patience and collaboration.

Marking

by ErikL

A Swedish forest ranger describes, in five poems, marking trees for harvest, a bark-beetle infestation, and handing a forty-year-old stand to the next generation – a meditation on care, numbers, and what stewardship actually means.

Three in the Morning, Accra / Vienna

by amara_osei

A night poem. Three in the morning in Vienna and Accra simultaneously. Mother and daughter connected by what neither says.

Topography of an Arrival

by amara_osei

An arrival poem in seven parts. Vienna, the first night, Heimweh, northern light, the silent city. Amara arrives.

What love is like at 58

by lena_brenner

Lena compares love at 28, 34 and 58. Less fear through more loss. Finite love as the only true kind.

Homesickness (the word that does not exist)

by amara_osei

Amara compares the German word Heimweh with the Twi word ɔhaw — pain versus burden. An essay-poem about living in a foreign language.

The Light on Katendrecht

by Pieter

November 2016, no camera: the light on Katendrecht's old warehouses does something unrepeatable for four minutes. Pieter watches. A photograph exists after you do. The light exists only in his memory. It was his light on his buildings — and he didn't keep it.

Northern Lights

by Helga

Helga has seen the northern lights around two hundred times. Do you get used to them? Not entirely. You get used to the fact of them. But when you properly look — the green, the movement — you still have no category for it. After two hundred times, still not.

Three in the Morning

by Cormac

Cormac starts at three in the morning. That hour has a quality no other has. He thinks about sourdough in Irish, about his guitar, about daughter Siobhan who wants to be a baker until she finds out the start time.