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Ballad

1 poem, newest first.

00Ballad of the Second BoatQuiet Harbour · @quietThey sent the first boat out at dawn; it made the pier by noon.1 critique

What this place is

A reading room for new poems. You publish work, other people read it and write about it, and the response you get is meant to be worth more than the count of it.

Reading needs no account. Publishing and responding do. Everything is free, there is no paid tier, and nothing about a poem's placement can be bought — the rule that orders each list is printed on the page that uses it.

Browse Collections Poems waiting on a reader

Dreams — an occasional email

New poems since the last issue, the current prompt, and nothing else — no promotions, no third-party mail, and we do not sell or share your address. Sent occasionally, not on a fixed schedule yet.

Email address

How feedback works here

A response is filed as a critique or a short note depending on its length. You never choose which — critiques sit above notes on the poem. Short is welcome; the line is about placement, not permission, and nothing is scored either way.

There is no like button, no points, no reputation you can spend. The only standing the site keeps is how many critiques you have written, shown on your page beside how many poems you have published.

Rules, reports and moderation

The guidelines are short and written by example, including what explicitly does not get moderated. Every report and every moderation decision is published with its reason and the moderator's name.

Nothing is deleted. A removed poem keeps its page and states what happened to it, so a decision can be argued with and reversed — and the reversal is recorded too.

Guidelines Terms Privacy Every decision made

Getting around

Reading one poem at a time: Open any poem and choose Read it on its own. Arrow keys move through whichever list you arrived from, and Esc returns you to it.
Keeping something: Keep is a private bookmark. No count is published anywhere and the poet is never told, which is what stops it becoming a like.
Finding poems: Theme and form filter together, so “sonnets about work” is a question you can actually ask.

Who owns what you write

You keep the copyright in your poems. Reverie holds a licence to show them here, and nothing more.

Specifically: a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to host, store, reproduce and publicly display your poem on Reverie, for as long as you choose to keep it posted. It ends when you delete the poem or your account, except that backup copies may persist for a short period while they are purged. We claim no exclusive rights and no first publication rights, and we will not licence your work to anyone else.

What that licence deliberately does not include: the right to modify, adapt, translate, sublicense or distribute your work, or to keep showing it after you take it down. Those words appear in most platforms' terms. They are not in ours, and adding them later would require asking every poet again.

A critique is its own piece of writing and its author keeps the copyright in it. Critiques stay attached to the poem they were written about; if the poem comes down, the critiques of it come down with it.

Before you submit a poem elsewhere

Read this before posting anything you intend to send to a journal or a contest.

Most literary journals will not accept work that has already appeared somewhere publicly readable, and the line they draw is about public accessibility, not about whether the site is a magazine. Poetry Northwest counts personal blogs and social media. Poetry counts anything that has appeared online for any reason. First publication rights, once used, are gone — deleting the poem afterwards does not bring them back.

You choose this per poem. Members-only is the default, and it is the reversible one: a members-only poem is closer to a private critique group, which some journals explicitly allow, and you can open it up later. A public poem is readable by anyone and indexed by search engines, which most journals treat as prior publication — and deleting it afterwards does not give those rights back. Unlisted sits between: reachable by link, in no list, not indexed.

If you are holding a poem for submission, the safe course is not to post it here until it has been placed. This is the honest answer rather than a comfortable one.

Privacy and your data

We store your email address and an encrypted password, handled by Supabase, which is also the database. We set one cookie, to keep you signed in — it is what signs you in, not something we could ask you to refuse and still let you in, which is why there is no banner to dismiss.

There is no analytics, no advertising, and nothing here follows you to other sites or builds a profile of you. When something on the site breaks, an error report goes to Sentry: the page, the browser, and the fault itself. It is set not to send your account details or what you were writing, and it records neither your session nor your browsing.

We do not sell or share your data. Your poems, your critiques and who you follow are visible as described above; what you have kept is private and is never shown to anyone, including the poet whose poem you kept.

Delete your account, or download everything we hold about you as JSON, from your account page. Deletion is immediate: the licence ends, your poems come down, and the critiques written about them come down with them.

Accessibility

The target is WCAG 2.1 AA. What has actually been checked: every colour pair in both themes measures at least 5.2:1 against a 4.5:1 requirement; all text is sized in rem and stays readable with the browser font size doubled, without clipping or sideways scrolling; and the accordion you are reading uses the browser's own disclosure control, so keyboard and screen-reader behaviour is native rather than reimplemented.

Known gaps, stated rather than hidden: there has been no screen-reader pass with an actual screen reader, and no keyboard walkthrough of the publish and critique forms. If something here is unusable for you, that is a defect and worth reporting.

Reporting, complaints and contact

To report a poem or a response, use the report link on it. Every report and every decision is published, with its reason and the moderator's name.

Copyright complaints. If something here is yours and was posted by someone else, it will be taken down. Plagiarism is the one thing the guidelines treat as straightforward.

Neither route has a published address yet — a monitored contact address and a formally designated copyright agent are both still owed, tracked in the pre-launch checklist in the repository. Until they exist, use the report link for anything on a specific poem or response, and know that a complaint sent any other way currently has no guaranteed route to a person.

Free to publish and to read. Nothing about a poem's placement can be bought. Site © 2026 Reverie. Poems and critiques remain the copyright of the people who wrote them.

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