Dear friends,

I trust this finds you in good spirits. This is the first time I’m sending you an email like this. As suspected, adding music to our website has raised our bandwidth usage to almost 1.2 TB/month! Our 750 GB add-on which we could barely afford was put to shame and increased automatically.

Don't worry though, we're not going to remove the music. In fact, we are stupid & romantic and have decided that we want to include audio recordings of each poem we’ve ever published (that's almost 1100 poems). This will end up dramatically increasing our bandwidth usage further, aka, the cost will sky rocket (from 6K~/year to a ridiculous 30 grand a year — what the fuck?!).

But we want to make poetry as accessible and alive as possible, and also acknowledge that it is as much a spoken art as it is written. Reading poetry aloud is one of the most intimate acts I know & to add that touch of intimacy on our website has long been our desire.

One of our very kind readers has given $1500 toward this project, and a second donor has offered to match every dollar we raise this week (!!) so everything you send, comes to ONLY POEMS doubled. Here’s where you can make a one-time contribution:

Nothing is too little, nothing is too much. If we miraculously end up raising more than we expect, we’ll use that to increase our contributor honorariums.

Everyone who supports us, or is on the fence about it, you have our utmost gratitude. For ones who are not able to support us financially, know your generous readership is more than enough. Thank you for sharing the poetry we publish, for participating in our submission calls, and telling everyone about your favourite magazine. So continue to eat up as much of our bandwidth as you like — we do it all for you.

Sincerely yours,

Karan