about
Almost everything on the web is built to move you along. Infinite feeds, autoplay, headlines written to be skimmed, a read time printed above every article so you can decide whether it is worth the minutes. The design goal is speed, and most of us have learned to read at that speed.
linger reverses the deal. It is a small collection of poems that only finish for readers who slow down. Each line arrives as a skeleton: a few words floating in empty space, with blanks where the rest should be. Hold still and the blanks fill in, a few words at first, then all of them. Scroll fast and they drain away again.
The skeletons were written to stand on their own: sparser poems, closer to weather reports than memories. The full poems are there only for someone who stays with each line for a few seconds, which on the modern web is a long time.
They are about the stretches of time that most days try to get rid of. Sitting in the driveway before going inside. A snow day. A power outage. Four hundred miles of the same field. A Sunday with nothing in it.
I wanted to make something that can't be skimmed for its content. There is no way to skip ahead, no summary, and nothing to share. The reward for going slowly is the poems themselves.
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SKIM
Faster than about 700 pixels a second. You get the skeleton.
· snow · · · open · · page -
PAUSE
Hold still on a line for about a second. Some of the blanks fill in.
· snow · it lay open · a page -
LINGER
Stay with a line for about four seconds. It completes.
the snow beneath it lay open like a page
The page measures one thing: how fast it is moving. Nothing is stored, sent, or counted. There are no cookies, no analytics, and no share button.
Plain HTML, CSS, and about a hundred lines of JavaScript. Set in Archivo and IBM Plex Mono.
Poems licensed CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Code licensed MIT, on GitHub.