ABSTRACT This article presents a map of a ‘poetic geography’ of short literature that appeared in public in two districts on the Asian side of Istanbul, Türkiye between 2020 and 2023. I use Michel de Certeau’s concept of ‘Walking the City’ from his The Practice of Everyday Life (1984) to link space and time to map the literary material found in Istanbul’s Üsküdar and Kadıköy districts. A poetic geography contrasts with a literal map that reduces all traces to a geometrically consistent two-dimensional surface. Mapping a poetic geography offers the advantages of annotating short verbal expressions in their lived environments without the need to collect, control, and own literary fragments. After an introduction to ‘Walking Istanbul’ through a comparison of short literary fragments found in the Rasimpaşa (Kadıköy) and Mimar Sinan (Üsküdar) neighbourhoods, I offer a definition of short literary genres that includes the material, or space and time of rhetorical figures, topoi and tropes, as embodied practices. Including the material allows for both researchers and residents to annotate examples of short literature that are distributed in diverse materials across unique urban settings.