I don't know if this is just a quirk of how print does its job, but I've found that print statements with strings that begin with a "\n" newline character get cut off in the middle of the line.

In this image, the lines who are cut off are formatted with a \n at the beginning
print("\nthird")

print("\nfourth")

print("\nfifth")

I'm in a bit of a hurry, will update with more later.

It looks like this is caused by the screen scroll. It looks like PICO-8 only scrolls the screen after it draws the text, resulting in half of the line being cut off.