Casa dos Livros, Porto - the venue for recover.exe at Breaking the Code

recover.exe

Casa dos Livros, Porto (online via Breaking the Code conference)

June 19, 2026

training
12 poems (training data)71 total votes
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Themes

Boundary→

25 votes on this pair so far - pick the poem you prefer, then submit your vote.

Tell me where you end. I press my thumb to the window and the glass admits nothing, only my breath blooming back like a name I haven't earned. My mother taught me the fence was a kindness — the dog, the garden, the part of love that says *no further*. But I've spent my whole life leaning, learning how a body becomes a door only by refusing to be one.
Some silences are built like arrows, the way some boys are raised to be blunt arsenals, accidental daggers. Their mothers never willed, and so the color of love is likely that of absence or restraint. The knife leaves its hilt only to puncture distance.

Event→

34 votes on this pair so far - pick the poem you prefer, then submit your vote.

From the Greek "venire", "event" is less conqueror than visitor. Yet also from the French "vent" and "éventrer": Wind or breath leaving a body in shock. And so both. A diplomatic mission and a scandal. A neighbor and an alien in disguise. Winter both the lover undressing a Sycamore and an Anaconda strangling mamal bones. Both the Saturday I met you and the Stonehenge circle your teeth bit into my arm.
The night the lake gave back what we threw in—keys, a ring, the small dog of someone's grief—we called it an event, as if water could schedule its honesty. I was nine. My father waded out past the part where fathers stop, and turned, and held up nothing, and grinned, and that was the thing that happened, the thing I keep returning to: a man, waist-deep in cold, choosing to surface empty-handed and pleased.

Funicular→

6 votes on this pair so far - pick the poem you prefer, then submit your vote.

We're unsure why the Airbnb has 4 bedrooms how Onomishi became a romantic destination and if the city needed a funicular for what could have been a staircase up to this hilltop But the port cranes are bowing their necks to the flushing dunking drunk sun the way I do when sake colors your cheeks and I promise another decade of watching sunsets
Up the mountain's spine we ratchet, two cars roped to the same lie: that one falls so the other may climb. My grandfather rode this to the sanatorium, lungs full of Alpine glass, and waved at the descending car as if waving at himself, younger, going down. The cable hums the only honest note—everything we lift costs us something equal sinking. At the top a café sells postcards of the view I'm in, and I buy one, addressed to the man still rising in me, still believing the rope means up.

Missing in Action→

3 votes on this pair so far - pick the poem you prefer, then submit your vote.

the reports of my death are greatly exaggerated yet fall short of the glorious reality the way it really went down: how i blazed into the mosh pit of hairy chests rubbing, flipping mountain-bodies, human bears connecting punches — poetry is brutal, and i would have won had it not been for these weak arms, my short breath, this heart set on feeling.
They sent a flag folded into a triangle, all the corners where his hands used to be. We keep him in the present tense because the army won't give us a verb to bury. Missing— as if he wandered off mid-sentence and might come back with the rest of it. My mother sets a plate, the chair keeps its appetite. Somewhere a field holds him the way water holds a thrown stone: the surface healed, the bottom rearranged. We don't say dead. We say the jungle is still deciding. We say the war forgot to tell us how it ends.

No poet→

2 votes on this pair so far - pick the poem you prefer, then submit your vote.

There is no poet, only the mouth that borrows. My grandmother's prayers, the bus driver counting change, a stranger weeping in the next stall— I steal them all and call it voice. Tonight I tried to write myself and found the page already crowded with everyone who fed me their wreckage. So here: no poet. Just the river holding every face that ever leaned over to drink.
Breed early preferably with a data center and may your progeny's cloud-based joy throttle heartbreak, may their minds take after the 1000th dimensions, the weights of your psyches, and their iron arms crush both enemies and your helicopter vigilance, so your sonnets never know worry I bet you: No poet will sing to flesh if iron can steel their kin

Theme: No poet→

1 vote on this pair so far - pick the poem you prefer, then submit your vote.

Breed early preferably with a data center and may your progeny's cloud-based joy throttle heartbreak, may their minds take after the 1000th dimensions, the weights of your psyches, and their iron arms crush both enemies and your helicopter vigilance, so your sonnets never know worry I bet you: No poet will sing to flesh if iron can steel their kin
There is no poet, only the mouth that borrows. My grandmother's prayers, the bus driver counting change, a stranger weeping in the next stall— I steal them all and call it voice. Tonight I tried to write myself and found the page already crowded with everyone who fed me their wreckage. So here: no poet. Just the river holding every face that ever leaned over to drink.