these are mine. each one is set with a different trick from the white space page, and the note under each poem says which. if you want to see how one was done, use view source; i left the code as plain as i could.

six of us stand in a row,
not talking, breathing
small ghosts at the schedule
as if it could be talked into anything.

a man in a parka
stamps his feet like a horse.
a girl holds her coffee
in both hands, like a bird she found.

and when the bus comes around the corner
we forgive it all at once,
the way you forgive the weather,
because what else is there to do.

set with <br> at the end of each line and <p> between stanzas. nothing else. this is the one to copy if you only learn one.

she could peel an apple
    in one long curl
        and hand it to me
            like a ribbon from the fair.

now they rest on the blanket,
    the knuckles big as walnuts,
and when i hold one
    she holds back,
        still,
            harder than you'd think.

set with &nbsp;, four at a time, so the lines step down the page like the apple peel. the steps won't line up perfectly in every font, and for this poem i don't mind.

the dryers in the basement
of my dorm
go around          and around
like they have somewhere to be.

quarters: four.
socks: one short.
the change machine eats a dollar
and doesn't say a word.

i fold my roommate's sweater
because it's there,
because it's two in the morning
and anything warm
              is a kindness.

set in <pre>, because i wanted the gap in the third line to be exactly that wide, the length of a dryer's pause before it turns back the other way, and the last line to sit out there by itself. the price is courier. i kept every line short so it won't run off a small screen.

the library, fourth floor

up here the radiators
knock like somebody
who forgot a key.
nobody looks up.

the boy across
the table has spent
forty minutes
on one page
of chemistry.
i have spent them
on one line.

we are both
pretending to be
somewhere else,
which is what
the fourth floor
is for.

set inside two <blockquote>s for the margins, with <br> and <p> inside. it sits in the middle of a lot of quiet, which is the point. two blockquotes inside a narrow page leave a narrow column, so i wrote the lines short, or the browser would have broken them for me.

a prose poem, so there are no line breaks of mine to keep. the browser wraps it wherever it wants, and that's all right, because the lines aren't the poem here; the sentences are. but i put it in a table 260 pixels wide so it wraps into a narrow column instead of running clear across a big monitor.