Every poem on this page has exactly three lines, and every one first appeared in an issue of Three Line Poetry. The journal has published poems this size since 2011. The archive now holds thousands of them across sixty issues, so when someone asks us for examples of three-line poems, we can answer from our own pages.
Sixteen poems follow, sorted loosely by what they are doing: image poems, love poems, poems about grief, and poems that go for the laugh. Between the groups you will find a short note on why the form suits each subject. Every poem links to the issue it came from, where you can read forty more by other poets.
The sixteen were chosen from more than two thousand published poems, and the picking was not scientific. We wanted range: poems from the first issue and from recent ones, poets who appear in the archive once and poets who keep returning, plain diction next to strange diction. What they share is compression that does not feel starved. Read them slowly. A three-line poem taken at prose speed is over in four seconds and leaves nothing behind; the same poem read line by line, with a real pause at each break, opens up.
What makes a poem with 3 lines work is almost always the same thing: a turn. The first line sets something down, the second complicates it, and the third lands somewhere the reader did not expect to go. When a short poem fails, it is usually because the three lines are one sentence chopped into pieces, with no turn at all. Watch for the pivot in each example below. It is nearly always in the last line, and it is nearly always earned by what the first two lines held back.
One thing you will not find here is a strict haiku, though several poems come close. This journal takes any poem in three lines, whatever its syllable count. If you want the taxonomy, we keep a separate guide to the forms of three-line poetry: haiku, senryu, tercet, and lune.
16 poems from the archive
The oldest job of a short poem is to hold a single image still long enough for a reader to see it. Nothing in this group explains itself. David Shultz gets a winter sky, a cave mouth, and icicles into a dozen words, and the poem ends before the mind can wander. Bill Melton’s Big Dipper poem works because the metaphor is exact: the constellation really is shaped like a ladle, and once he tips it, the stars pour. Catherine LoFrumento uses even less. A plum, a canoe, the moon. She never says the moon looks like a half-eaten plum; the line break says it for her. And Martha Christina wraps a tree in ice overnight, in eight words.
Love poems usually fail by saying too much, which gives a poem with 3 lines a head start. Patrick Jamieson fits a whole relationship into fourteen words, and the sunglasses carry what an essay could not. Theresa Cancro moves from falling snow to a held hand in a single sentence. James Plume keeps the wobbling chair his partner once threw, and forgives it in the last line. Thomas Hayes charts a marriage as sound: dialogue, then monologue, then crickets.
Grief may be the subject the form serves best, because grief resists explanation anyway. Todd Grant’s epitaph in the sand makes the classic move: one image, then the sentence that turns it. Debbi Antebi watches a watch; the hands still crawl, the wrist does not. Kevin Andersen pours beer into the sea for his grandfather, and the plain speech of it is the poem. Michael Flanagan sets a dropping coffin against birdsong and lets the two facts argue.
The three-line poem shares a border with the joke. Both need a setup and a turn, and both die if the timing is off. Connor Bjotvedt’s morning dread lands on toothpaste. Franklin Murdock’s poem, from our very first issue, is eight words and one strange handshake. Claire Scott rewrites Eliot’s famous ending for the delivery-truck era. Rachelle Mathis puts a Sex Pistols t-shirt in a yard of blooming dogwoods, which is funnier and sadder than it has any right to be. If comic poems look easier, count how many words each of these wastes.
If these look easy, try one. Three lines, no other rules. The usual failure is the chopped sentence; the fix is to give each line its own weight, so the poem turns on its way down. Our writing advice page covers line length and meter, and our guide to three-line forms explains haiku, senryu, tercets, and lunes if you want a stricter frame to push against.
There is more to read, too. The whole archive is free online, and we gather poems by subject on our poems by theme pages: love, nature, night, loss, and more.
Three Line Poetry reads submissions year round, and publication is free. Fewer than six in a hundred submissions are accepted, which is exactly why acceptance means something. Send us your best three lines.