NaPoWriMo 2025 (April 29th): The Woman Who Chose Absence

From NaPoWriMo 2025 (Day Twenty Nine): Happy Tuesday, all, and happy penultimate day of Na/GloPoWriMo.

Our featured participant today is Adil Akbar, whose response to Day 28’s “music and ceremonies” prompt rather reminds us of César Vallejo.

Today’s daily resource is the online galleries of the Whitney Museum, where you’ll find artwork as varied as this fun portrait of Billie Jean King, a Frank Stella sculpture that looks like what would happen if a space station fell in love with a bridge, and this contemporary take on the classic embroidered sampler.

And now for today’s prompt – optional as always. Just as poetry is made by poets, music is made by musicians. There is always a living being behind the words, the rhythm, and at the heart of every song. Just as music and poetry can fascinate in their own right, so do the personalities behind every form of art. In her poem, “Canary,” Rita Dove riffs on Billie Holiday, and how her life has been spun into myth. Likewise, in “Ode for Donny Hathaway,” Wanda Coleman muses on another tragic figure, in the form of the eponymous soul singer and keyboardist.

Today, we’d like to challenge you to write a poem that takes its inspiration from the life of a musician, poet, or other artist. And while our example poems are squarely elegiac, don’t feel limited to minor-key feelings in your own work.

Happy (?) writing!

NOTE: I am so late I almost forgot about this, and there was a storm, so I fell asleep like a baby and woke up in the middle of the night to write for this prompt, and got distracted for a couple of hours arranging some hundred random links and messages. So, I am absolutely delirious right now. I’ve twisted this prompt into a deliciously conspiratorial one. I’m going to take a writer/poet who’s used a pseudonym (someone cryptic, semi-anonymous, hiding in plain sight, but never known) and from there, build a fictional "real self" behind the mask of their persona. Kind of Paul Auster meets Roberto Bolaño, a bit of postmodern noir with poetic ruin scrawled into the margins.

BACKDROP: 

Inspiration: Elena Ferrante (Italy)

We still don’t really know who Ferrante is. Yes, journalists have made various claims, even using financial records and real estate deeds to try and "out" her, but Ferrante, the author of the Neapolitan Novels, has insisted that the anonymity is part of the work. She writes in Italian, but her voice is global, intimate, and terrifyingly raw. She embodies womanhood, class struggle, memory, and creative obsession with such eerie precision that it feels lived like a diary whispered into an attic floorboard. So now… let’s do what the world doesn’t know. I will be unearthing a dossier lost in the Vatican’s forbidden archives or smuggled out of some smoky Milanese literary salon.

• Name: Rafaella di Lupo
• Born: March 17, 1949
• Birthplace: Oliveto Lucano, a nowhere village where wolves outnumber buses.
• Occupation: Midwife by day, illegal bookseller by night.
• Education: Taught to read by a nun who carved quotes from Dante into tree bark.
• Wrote her first novel in goat’s blood and blackberry ink (revised later with a biro).
• Never married, not out of principle but forgetfulness.
• Favorite word: estraneo (stranger).
• Believes literature is an exorcism, not entertainment.
• Theory: She lives in a crumbling house built into a cliffside. Her manuscripts are mailed via a boy who doesn’t speak. She’s got a wall covered in torn-apart pages of Simone Weil, Lucia Berlin, and Rimbaud. Each character she writes is a person she tried, and failed, to become.
• Status: Active. Undocumented. Believed to be a non-person under Italian citizenship records post-1977.
• Last Seen: Leaving the port of Salerno in 1989, wrapped in a shawl stitched with marginalia.
• Only writes between 3:12 a.m. and 4:01 a.m., convinced that’s when memory is most porous and shame is still half-asleep.
• Considers all novels to be confessionals, but lies constantly—especially when telling the truth.
• Sends edits to her translator on torn scraps of brown butcher paper. Each one ends with the same phrase: “Burn after meaning.”
• The Apartment on Via delle Ombre: An address without a buzzer. Inside, stacks of books double as furniture. The walls are hand-painted with notes from a diary she insists she didn’t write. On the kitchen table:
• One fountain pen.
• A teacup full of red wine.
• A playing card with the queen’s face scratched out.
• A letter from someone named “Lenù” that ends: “You wrote me into being, and then you left me here. I hope your ghosts are kinder than mine.”
• Rumors & Red Threads:
• In the 70s, she was rumored to have translated Ingeborg Bachmann under a pseudonym which later disappeared from the publisher’s catalogue.
• She once mailed a manuscript soaked in sea salt and bundled in fishing net. When opened, every third word was smeared—readers described it as “the most emotionally accurate censorship of grief.”
• Her handwriting allegedly resembles that of three separate literary women, now dead, all unrelated. A coincidence? Or a composite ghost?
• Hidden Bibliography: 
• The Silence of Garlic (1975): a novella allegedly about cooking, but actually about sexual shame and Catholic repression.
• Figlia Della Neve (“Daughter of Snow”): unpublished, rumored to exist only in oral form, passed between women who meet in candlelit libraries once a decade.
• The Left Side of the Bed: poems so elliptical and cryptic they’ve been banned in Naples for “inducing familial unrest.”
• Final Truth (or Lie?): There is no Ferrante. There never was. There was only the woman who chose absence louder than presence and in that absence, we all found a mirror.

The Woman Who Chose Absence

{Inspired by the invented secret identity behind the pseudonym 'Elena Ferrante' — Rafaella di Lupo, the woman who chose absence over fame.}

In Oliveto Lucano, where the wolves sang first,
she was born; not wept for, but noted,
like a comma in the parish ledger.

By day, she pulled screaming souls from the screaming dark.
By night, she stitched forbidden words into the hems of her skirts.
The villagers said the wind in the cliffs spelled her name,
but they never agreed on the spelling.

At 3:12 a.m., while the shame still slept,
she dipped her pen in blackberry blood,
writing not stories,
but exorcisms,
each word a scream swallowed inside a stranger’s throat.

Her manuscripts sailed from her cliffside —
carried by a boy who had no tongue,
wrapped in butcher paper that smelled of salt,
marked with a warning:

Burn after meaning.

No portrait remains. Only furniture made of books.
Only a teacup that never spills.
Only a letter, unsigned, reading:

"You wrote me into being.
You left me in the mirror.
I hope your ghosts are kinder than mine."

Some say she dissolved into salt spray.
Some say she inked herself into disappearance.
Some say Ferrante is a myth we made,
when we needed a woman to blame
for telling the truth so beautifully
we wanted her dead for it.

- Oizys.

NaPoWriMo 2025 (April 28th): When the Drums Wept

From NaPoWriMo 2025 (Day Twenty Eight): Welcome back, all. As of today, there’s just three days left in this year’s Na/GloPoWriMo.

Today, our featured participant is Mariyah, who brings us a poignant take on Modigliani portrait in response to Day 27’s painting-based prompt.

Today’s daily resource is El Museo del Barrio, a New York City museum focused on the experience of Puerto Ricans and Latin Americans in the United States. The museum’s website provides highlights from its permanent collection, as well videos exploring the art and artists featured.

Last but not least, here is today’s prompt (optional, as always). Music features heavily in human rituals and celebrations. We play music at parties; we play it in parades, and at weddings. In her poem, OBIT [Music], Victoria Chang describes the role that music played in her mother’s funeral. Today, we challenge you to write a poem that involves music at a ceremony or event of some kind.

Happy, or at the very least, meaningful, writing!

When the Drums Wept

In the crumbling church by the mango tree,
the drums began before the priest could speak.
They beat the drums in mockery of the old oaths,
each strike a curse hurled at an almost-forgotten dictator.
Not an organ, not a hymn,
but a pulse, fierce and rib-shaking,
a heartbeat the sky itself leaned in to hear.

Grandmother clutched her beads,
her hands trembling like old paper.
She spat once into the dust,
a blessing or a curse, no one could tell.

The crows on the steeple bowed their heads,
and the wind stitched shut its traitor’s mouth.

Torches bloomed among the ruins,
and the smoke braided itself into the stars.
Wild vines clutched the broken stone,
spelling prayers in a language older than stories.

Music: raw, ruthless;
spilled out into the courtyard like black oil,
slicking the steps, the flowers, the open graves.
It was a funeral, yes,
but it was also an uprising.
A remembering.
A reminder.
A refusal.

The children tore down the tattered banners,
scattering ashes over polished graves,
beating the drums until their palms tore,
laughing the way prisoners laugh when the gates fall.

The dead listened.
The living danced.
And no one,
no one:
Bowed.

They danced not for the gods,
but against them.

They tore the gold crosses from the crumbled altar,
hammered their fists against the tombstones
until the stone wept dust.

They spat verses backward,
draped broken banners over the priest’s abandoned robes,
and danced on the bones of kings.

Not to the priest,
not to the polished marble tombs,
not to the faded flags in the rafters.

Because in that moment,
every ache, every stolen hymn, every broken promise,
was dragged into the open and made to bleed.

And when the music finally died,
when the last drum split its skin with one exhausted sigh,
it was not silence that followed.
It was the birth of a future they had been denied.

The crows took flight.
The earth sighed open.
And from the wreck of the old temple,
something unholy and beautiful
clawed and crowned with rust,
began to grow,
writhing its way upward like a fierce garden,
thorned with old prayers,
howling its name in a tongue no priest could bless.

- Oizys.

inventory of survival // neon exodus // receipt-paper psalms // the god of aisle seven // plague, song, and clearance tags // bless your brokenness

i make it out alive.

actually.
now what:

the fluorescent lights of 6 pm bend over me like a disappointed choir.
aisle seven: pasta, wine, more loneliness than the management has shelf space for.
i press my palm against the glass jars like a lover. marinara. carbonara. alfredo.
sauces for the different ways grief learns to dress itself.

a girl in a thrift store mirror tells me g—d is hiding behind the prom dresses.
g—d has yellow nail polish and chewing gum breath. g—d winks at me and steals a sequin clutch.
i laugh. security doesn't see. they never do.

outside, a moon made of bitten fingernails peels itself open and says,
"you survived, sure. now survive the surviving."
the parking lot hums psalms only jewish grandmothers remember.
they smell like mothballs and old paperbacks and stubborn prayers.

i carry a bottle of cheap red and a box of rigatoni in arms that still remember cradle and coffin.
there’s no banquet waiting for me. just the long, slow mikvah of cooking for one.
wine spills like blood. pasta sticks to the walls like regret.
i eat with my hands. i let the sauce smear my face like warpaint.

there are no rules here. no clean plates. no clean endings.

just a girl,
just a g—d,
just a grocery list rewritten in the language of hunger.

—

AND then:

doors crack open wider:
the angel in aisle nine wears torn sneakers and hisses secrets at me through chipped teeth,
"you are not built for their furniture. you are not built for their futures."

i tie sadness around my wrist like a hospital band. it glows pink under the checkout scanner.
the cashier says have a nice night and i say i dare you to mean it.
i stack cans of hope next to guilt next to forgiveness next to red wine and the clerk does not blink.
they are used to girls like me, they say,
girls who wear their survival on their receipts.

the parking lot is a temple and my cart is a coffin and my shoes are altars.
i immerse myself in low-sodium marinara.
i ascend into the headlights.
i crown myself with plastic bags.

g—d texts me at 3:11 a.m.: u up?
i leave it on read.

i build a throne out of boxed macaroni and whisper my own commandments:
thou shalt not apologize for limping.
thou shalt not wait for resurrection.
thou shalt not pretend pasta is ever just pasta.

the master's house is a clearance rack.
the master's house is on fire.
the master's tools are melting into ugly jewelry no one wants.

i make it out alive.
actually.
now what:

i lick the warpaint off my own mouth.
i sit cross-legged in the ashes.
i eat.
i bless my hunger.
i begin again.

—

AND THEN:

i am lamb.
i am lamb.
i am lamb, throat lined with tongues, the mall's halogen mercy singing my sins clean.
i am lamb, marked for exodus, blood on the doorframe of survival.
i am lamb, running from bondage into the blistering new day.
i am lamb, whose blood on the doorpost.

somewhere, eighth grade judaism class:
moses parts the sea of lockers,
david slingshotting spitballs at goliath, the math teacher,
rachel weeps in the gymnasium bathroom,
a menorah lights my chipped front tooth when i smile wrong.

the thrift store g—d lifts me in her dirty fingernails and says:
"you are the prayer and the breaking."

in the back of the pasta aisle, i hear the moon weeping 
seven apple slices left rotting on a cafeteria tray.
the wine in my bag sobs softly like a fever dream.
six pm becomes six twenty-one becomes six twenty-two 
each minute another nail in girlhood's coffin.

g—d unpacks her pockets:
one friendship bracelet,
one candy wrapper,
one photograph of a girl grinning through bloody knees.

i ask her for a blessing.
she hands me a shopping list instead:

1. rigatoni
2. mouthfuls of dirt
3. the word "beloved" written backward on my ribs

outside:
the asphalt splits like red sea.

(they say one girl tried to split the parking lot herself. she slammed her cart into the cracks until her hands bled. the asphalt yawned open, not for her, but she walked through it anyway, like stubbornness was enough.)

shopping carts crash into each other like tired prophets.
the angels are drunk and barefoot, trying to parallel park destiny.

(the oven of akhnai cracked open in aisle nine, and from it spilled a thousand arguments, a thousand miracles, a thousand girls who chose survival over silence.)

i think i will make it out alive.
actually.
now what:

i tattoo the receipt across my heart.
i eat the psalms like crumbs of ancient bread.
i laugh and laugh until the fluorescent lights short-circuit.

i bless the loneliness.
i drink the grief like wine.
i kneel before the half-off rigatoni and i call it holy.

amen.
amen.
amen in lowercase only.

—

and THEN:

the clouds unhinge their jaws,
spilling shopping carts, lost receipts, bloody homework, abandoned rosaries, unsent letters,
girlhood sobbing in a thousand languages no teacher grades correctly.

the pasta aisle shudders—the shelves crumble—
noodle-storm, canned-tomato-hail
wine-rivers flood the automatic doors.

someone is screaming.
it might be me.
it might be g—d again, trying on my voice like a coat that doesn’t quite fit.

moses taps my forehead with a price scanner.
beep.
you are worth $4.99 on discount.
beep.
you are buy-one-get-one-free grief.

eve is crouched on top of the freezer section eating a bruised pomegranate.
"you survived," she says through purple teeth,
"but are you ready to hunger properly?"

i kneel at the manna fallen from the hunger between stars,
rail made of frozen pizzas and canned corn,
press my face to the holy linoleum,
whisper prayers in coupon codes and expired warranties.

the intercom crackles:
cleanup in aisle all of them.
cleanup in your gut.
cleanup in your mother's mistakes.

i crawl into the cart.
i crown myself queen of the expired yogurt kingdom.
the milk sours and we call it prophecy.
the bananas blacken and we call it wisdom.

the parking lot turns to salt.

(a girl looked back at the wine aisle and turned into a salt statue. they left her there for weeks, a warning and a prayer.)

the carts turn to locusts.
the sky cracks in half and out pour
all the girlhoods we buried under polite smiles,
all the g—d-mirrors we shattered at thirteen,
all the pasta dinners we made for no one.

someone lights a candle in the wine aisle.
someone tattoos a psalm on my tongue.
someone hands me a sword made of grocery lists and dares me to love it.

AND I:

carve the commandments into the inside of my own skin, backwards, so only the mirror can read them:

1. thou shalt not fear the fluorescent angels.
2. thou shalt dance barefoot through the broken glass of becoming.
3. thou shalt not apologize for being the flood, the famine, and the feast.

outside the store, the moon is bartering with a rabbi.
ten apple slices for safe passage.
a prayer for a coupon.
a kiss on the forehead for one more borrowed hour of softness.

i sprint through the broken glass doors, barefoot, bleeding, laughing.
one girl says: "survival is enough."
another girl says: "no, survival must sing."
a boy mutters: "singing is betrayal. silence is safer."
the prophet shrugs: "all are true," and stitches all three into her jacket.
g—d watches from the clearance aisle, scribbles both answers in the margins, blesses them all anyway and laughs
laughing like a heretic set free from the stake.
laughing like girlhood finally taking its gloves off.
laughing like wine stains are holy water.
laughing until the neon signs stutter and collapse into smoke.

i make it out alive.
actually.
now what:

i plant my receipt in the dirt.

(once, a girl planted an old shopping list. it sprouted strange things: a can of hope, a bruised plum, a song too broken to sing.)

i water it with old songs.
i watch as pasta blooms from the concrete like a golden plague.
i name every noodle after a girl who made it out broken but breathing.
i name every cracked jar after a promise i swore i'd keep.
i name every sip of wine after the nights the fear didn't win.

and the thrift store g—d watches.
and the eighth grade prophets watch.
and the wounded, glorious, furious angels of aisle seven watch.

and the stars blink like checkout scanners.

and i—
wine-drenched, receipt-armored, girl of broken aisles and burning prayers,
i keep walking.

into the smoking horizon.
into the unfinished psalm.
into the raggedy mouth of the next survival.

—

AND then:

the rigatoni vines climb up my arms, thorns made of shopping cart wires.
the wine puddles around my bare feet like a second, bloodier skin.

i grow a second mouth in my chest; it whispers recipes backwards,
whispers survival spells in the language of burnt toast and almosts.

the girl in the thrift store mirror slaps me across the face with a lace glove and says:
"no one is coming to save you, pilgrim."
"save yourself with coupons and curses."
"save yourself with store-brand wine and outlaw prayers."

and the parking lot splits again, wider now,
the cracks spill out every bad kiss, every unpaid therapy bill,
every desperate prayer whispered into jacket collars in late november.
visions start to rise from the asphalt cracks:

an old woman chanting prayers into a crumpled shopping bag.
a boy crowned in duct-taped receipts, blowing a shofar made from a soda can.
teenage girls lighting menorahs from cigarette ends and birthday candles.
a child dragging a plastic sword carved from abandoned milk crates.
moses himself leaning against a graffiti wall, sighing, sketching lost maps on a napkin.
rachel weeping over a fountain of spilled soda.
esther stealing lip gloss from the ruins and slipping it into broken pockets.
prophets dancing in the puddles of spoiled wine, barefoot and furious.
angels stitched from plastic bags and caution tape, unfolding into the floodlight skies.
an angel with a barcode halo weeping into a shopping cart.
ezra writing new commandments with a finger dipped in spilled cabernet.
a burning menorah hammered out of abandoned aluminum cans.
prophets in hoodies chanting old psalms into broken microphones.
sarah stitching broken promises into blankets made of receipt paper.
old babushkas lifting shopping bags like battle standards.
tired messiahs sleeping under clearance racks.
teenage girls wearing garbage bag wings, trying to fly.
the shekhinah herself flickering between the wine aisles, weeping and laughing at once.
a thousand mezuzahs glued to the checkout counters, crooked and shining. 
an old woman chanting hebrew prayers over shopping carts,
teenage girls lighting menorahs made of cigarette butts,
moses himself, leaning against a graffiti wall, rolling his eyes and muttering about lost promised lands.

a busker sets up an altar between two handicapped parking spaces:
he plays the violin with a butcher knife.
he plays hymns made from grocery store announcements and emergency sirens.

i stuff rigatoni into the pockets of my jacket.
i smear marinara across my cheeks like war paint.
i build a crown out of half-crushed soda cans.
a clerk in a shredded apron hands me a receipt the length of the torah:

one bruised pear: for the days you didn’t get up. 
one broken heel: for the nights you outran your shame.
two-for-one sorrow.
clearance rack forgiveness.
one cracked lipstick: for the prayers you whispered into bathroom mirrors.
half a packet of stolen gum: for the lies you told to survive yourself.
one broken zipper: for the days your own skin didn’t fit right.
five bruised apples: for the g—d(s?) you dared to love and leave behind. 
one broken umbrella: for the storms you thought you could outrun.
three crumpled receipts: for the prayers you forgot to say out loud.
half a pack of cigarettes: for the hopes you set on fire just to stay warm.
one chipped nail: for the battles you weren't supposed to survive.
twelve lint-covered candies: for the sweetness you refused to give up on.
one ripped shoelace: for the races you finished bloody.
a cracked compact mirror: for the faces you practiced loving.
one single earring: for the promises you kept even after they stopped shining.
an expired bus pass: for the cities you fled and the ones that never called you back.
a lipstick stump: for the mouths you taught yourself to bless instead of bite.
a bent library card: for the g—d(s?) you found hidden in secondhand stories.
one ticket stub: for the nights you applauded yourself just for staying breathing.
an empty packet of cheap instant coffee: for the mornings that tasted like burnt hope but still counted.
a bloodstained wristband: for the hospitals you escaped without leaving your laughter behind.

it wraps around my waist three times and hisses:
"bless your broken shopping carts. bless your tired g—d."

the thrift store g—d is back, eating from a bag of marshmallows with her hands,
she hands me a duct-taped bible missing half its pages,
where genesis is just a list of lost girls’ names,
and lamentations is just a directory of all the bruises nobody kissed better.

i stagger past a rack of clearance dreams:
one size fits nobody.
final sale, no returns.
tagged with sticky notes that read: "DO NOT PRAY BACKWARDS."

somewhere, somewhere inside the building,
a trumpet blows.
not for war.
for supper.
for survival.

a new exodus begins:
girls with wine-stained mouths,
girls carrying busted jars of hope,
girls limping, singing, laughing themselves hoarse.

the pasta aisle collapses.
the carts grow wings.

(the elders say once there were carts that lifted off the ground, wings stitched from old plastic bags, carrying the prayers of all the checkout girls who never made it out.)

the bottles of wine pop open by themselves and pour into the gutters like sacrament.

i stand in the middle of it:
rigatoni falling from the sky like plague hail;
hail made of forgotten birthdays
rivers of spilled soda and broken jewelry, lost engagement rings
lice hatched from old receipts and grief
flies stitched from cigarette ash and broken promises
disease blooming from unsent letters and unpaid therapy bills
boils in the shape of old nicknames you never outran
locusts swarming with barcodes and clearance tags
frogs croaking old breakup songs through busted speakers
darkness stitched from clearance racks and shuttered storefronts
the death of first dreams, heavier than all the others
and i open my arms.

—

AND THEN:

the eighth-grade prophets return, barefoot and furious,
dragging the tanakh behind them like a wounded animal.

they cut the sky open with safety scissors.
they staple stars to the darkness.
they staple my name to survival.
they staple pasta recipes into psalms.

they sing:
"and lo, the girl with the marinara warpaint shall inherit the earth, or at least the loyalty card points."

they sing:
"and blessed is she who survives the checkout line, for hers shall be the kingdom of takeout and rebellion."

they sing:
"and woe unto the clean-faced, the neatly carted, for they have never eaten pasta alone in a parking lot, and thus have never truly lived."

they sing:
"mark yourself with spilled wine and stubborn prayers.
bless yourself with sauce and salt and survival.
sing the old psalms rewritten in barcode and broken glass."

—

i laugh until i vomit hope onto the concrete.
i spin until the rigatoni in my pockets falls like broken teeth.
i dance until the asphalt bleeds forgiveness.

i eat the moon like tasting psalms.
i drink the wine rivers dry.
i immerse myself in clearance stickers and spilled spaghetti sauce.

and the thrift store g—d claps.
and the eighth-grade angels roar like dying stars.
and the rigatoni crown slips down my forehead and cuts me a little and i let it.
and the receipt around my waist catches fire but i don't put it out.

i survive.
i survive.
i survive so ugly it looks like worship.

and the lights flicker.
and the sky rips open wider.
and i do not flinch.
and i do not beg.
and i do not apologize.

—

and now:
neon liturgy

"hear, o survivors!"

bless the bruised pasta aisle.
bless the girl who licked wine from her own wounds.
bless the checkout clerks who never made eye contact.
bless the expired yogurts.
bless the pomegranate seeds in your pocket.
bless the cracked mirrors that dared to tell you you were holy.
bless the broken shoelaces.
bless the girls who never came back from the parking lot.
bless the checkout scanners that didn’t beep when you tried to steal back your dignity.
bless the bruised knuckles that knocked on locked doors anyway.
bless the forgotten girlhoods folded into clearance bins.
bless the receipt ink that smudged but refused to vanish.
bless the parking lot salt that seared your feet into remembering.
bless the empty pockets heavy with want.
bless the crooked teeth.
bless the bruised tongues that still learned to sing.
bless the receipt paper cutting your fingers into remembering.
bless the potholes and the pit stops and the prophets disguised as cashiers.
bless the shopping carts abandoned mid-aisle like silent prayers.
bless the midnight parking lots that gave you a place to become unholy and still beloved.
bless the angels with plastic bags for wings.
bless the broken barcode hymns stitched into your ribs.
bless the broken carts that tried to carry all of tikkun olam on rusted wheels.
bless the receipts stitched into scrolls of unfinished repair.

hail the thrift store g—d who carries stolen lip gloss.
hail the rigatoni crown.
hail the warpaint sauce.
hail the midnight prophets who stitched psalms from price tags.
hail the barefoot angels crowned in clearance stickers.
hail the daughters who danced barefoot across broken glass.
hail the shopping carts that became arks of rebellion.
hail the receipt-paper prayers whispered under flickering lights.
hail the old songs humming between freezer aisles.
hail the stubborn bloodlines of bruised girlhoods.
hail the cracked mirrors that remembered our faces.
hail the neon halos worn by broken prophets.
hail the milk crates that bore our sacred junkyard torahs.
hail the salt-stained prayers that no mouth dared to silence.
hail the glitter-stained commandments rewritten in back alleys.
hail the mourning that refused to go quietly.
hail the hands that stitched broken psalms into survival.
hail the mouths that sang even after being told to shut up.
hail the receipts long enough to wrap the world twice.
hail the g—d hiding in the clearance aisle, laughing and weeping both.
hail the cracked parking lot holy enough to hold our hurt.
hail the girls who carried the ruins like holy scrolls.
hail the burnt prayers that stitched us back together.
hail the unfinished psalms still written on our tongues.
hail the broken covenant we carried like a torch.
hail the world still waiting to be repaired.

curse the master’s house and salt the earth.
curse the full-priced salvation.
curse the apology stitched into every aisle.
curse the master's clearance rack.
curse the clearance rack altars.
curse the barcode g—d(s?) who scanned us without mercy.
curse the apologies stitched into barcode stickers.
curse the clean hands that never knew hunger.
curse the clean g—d(s?).
curse the polished aisles that pretended not to see.
curse the locked doors and smiling lies.
curse the forgetting of broken girls.
curse the silence that buried their names.
curse the stitches into the prayers that rebuild the world.
curse the salt of our survival that water the roots of the evil.
curse the cracked covenant that tried to erase our hunger.
curse the world built without deeds of lovingkindness.
curse the walls that crushed the last unanswered halakha.
curse the courts that called miracles heresy.
curse the broken steps that led us away from mercy.
curse the empty heavens that demanded we stay silent.
curse the dust that covered the shattered words at sinai.

mark yourself in clearance stickers.
bless yourself in spilled cabernet.
sing yourself in loneliness turned louder than sirens.

eat the bread of being misunderstood.
drink the wine of g—dless hunger.
sing the hymn of the receipt that refuses to fade.

crawl through the burning parking lot.
bite the moon.
bleed psalms.

and if you survive,
and you will survive,
you must bless yourself.

you must bless your brokenness.
you must curse your brokenness.
you must hail your brokenness.

amen.
amen.
amen in lowercase only.

—

then the rigatoni splits open at my feet
and from inside slither the names i tried to forget:
girls who kissed g—d on the mouth and spat out gravel,
girls who bled rosaries onto gym floors,
girls who slipped wine into the cracks of their mirrors and prayed it into oceans.

the eighth-grade prophets shriek a new gospel:
"blessed be the parking lot martyrs!"
"blessed be the girls who immersed themselves in bargain bins!"
"blessed be the ones who survived the fluorescent fires with marinara in their mouths!"

and the parking lot becomes an ark of exiles,
bearing away the last survivors of the aisle floods.

the carts turned to an ark stitched with promises,
dragging our salted prayers into the cracked horizon.
the oil stains become rivers.
the carts gather themselves into a procession,
creaking and holy,
and i climb inside one,
crowned in canned peaches and rigatoni vines,
and float on the neon flood.

—

the neon flood:

and the security alarms sing a new liturgy:
"unauthorized salvation. unauthorized survival."
"return to aisle seven for your exorcism."

but i do not return.
i ride the current of receipt-paper prayers.
i sail into the belly of the broken mall g—ds,
my body stitched with clearance stickers and holy profanity.

the thrift store g—d throws handfuls of plastic rhinestones at my head, shouting:
"bless your cracked feet, pilgrim."
"bless your back-pocket psalms."
"bless your hunger so wide it chews through heaven."

eve tosses me the bitten pomegranate.
moses folds me an escape map out of wine-stained receipts.
david beats the drums with empty rigatoni boxes.

and above it all:
the sky ripping wider, wider, a scream without end.
the eighth-grade angels trace my survival into the constellations.
with supermarket sparklers and glitter glue.

—

and THEN:

the checkout lane becomes a confession booth.
i lay down my sins:
one bottle of cheap red,
one box of rigatoni,
one heart bruised blue with girlhood.

i take bread in pasta water and regret.
i spit out my receipts like tongues of flame.

i kick open the automated doors with g—dblood on my face.

and when the fluorescent stars finally go dark—
when the parking lot swallows its own salt—
when the wine rivers run dry and the carts collapse like old bones—

i do not mourn.

i build my temple in the ruins,
brick by broken jar,
stone by scattered psalm,
thread by ragged receipt.

i build a mishkan
from the wreckage,
a sanctuary stitched with old songs
and broken hunger.

i sing:

"this survival is ugly."
"this survival is sacred."
"this survival is mine."

i survive.
i survive.
i survive.

so loud the abandoned aisles echo it back as gospel.

—

and now:
"neon incantation, in blood and receipts"

bless the wine rivers.
bless the aisle seven angels.
bless the girls who carried fire in their mouths and pasta in their pockets.

curse the master's clearance rack.
curse the apologies stitched into barcode stickers.
curse the clean hands that never knew hunger.

mark yourself in marinara.
bless yourself in duct tape psalms.
sing yourself in glitter and stubbornness.

kneel in the broken carts.
crawl through the salt rivers.
eat the burnt bread of loneliness.

sing in the voice the mall g—ds tried to steal.
laugh at the ceilings that dared to contain you.
build your ark out of abandoned receipts.

survive.

survive louder.

survive so hard you scare the fluorescent lights back into their sockets.

bless the hunger.
bless the breaking.
bless the beginning.

amen.
amen.
amen in lowercase only.

—

the final neon:

in the name of the girl who wore wine like lipstick,
in the name of the g—d who shoplifted hope,
in the name of the parking lot prophets, barefoot and burning:

bless the broken aisles.
bless the rigatoni thrones.
bless the receipts too long for anyone to carry alone.

hail the girls who crowned themselves in plastic bags.
hail the prophets who stitched psalms into price tags.
hail the angels dragging carts through broken glass.

curse the clean g—d(s?).
curse the clearance rack altars.
curse the locked doors and smiling lies.

mark yourself in spilled sauce.
bless yourself in duct-taped faith.
sing yourself in the hunger no one blesses.

kneel where the carts crash.
pray where the coupons bleed.
stand where the lights flicker and dare them to blink first.

bite the moon.
spit out the apologies.
write psalms in your own spit and shame.

survive like a riot.
survive like a prayer no priest would dare whisper.
survive like your blood sings in barcode.

amen.
amen.
amen in lowercase only.

—

a thousand years later,
a story unfurls within villages in late evenings by old beaches,
a girl, g—d-like, unholy,
leads a weird band of others
bruised girls, broken prophets, thrift store g—d(s?)
out into some unnamed desert.
not to find a promised land.
just to keep walking.
just to keep surviving.

and so we march—

(and somewhere, tucked in a crumbling parking lot corner, a voice older than all of us mutters: it is not your duty to fix this burning world. but it is your duty to walk through it, singing anyway.)

—past the smoking checkout lanes,
past the salt statues and broken price tags,
past the promises nobody kept.

the carts rattle and the asphalt splits and the rigatoni falls like rain,
and we walk barefoot through it,
girls and ghosts and prophets and g—d(s?),
all of us stitched with receipts and burning prayers.

no promised land waiting.
just the singing.
just the stubbornness.
just the holy broken walking forward.

may the broken be lifted.
may the forgotten be remembered.
may the stubborn still dance through the ruins.
may the ruined still build temples out of receipt paper and spit.
amen.
amen.
amen in lowercase only.

- Oizys.

P.S. –
a sacred text for the bruised, the stubborn, the barely-believing,
a living scripture for people who survive ugly and call it holy,
written not in gold,
but in (spilled) wine stains, (sprayed) salt, and (broken) receipts,
and sung with (holy) defiance.
inspired by the writing prompts (vii) by @sammie.jpg333,
not just writing:
forging a myth
in blood, marinara, psalms, and clearance stickers.
this was never about getting saved.
it was about learning to sing with blood still in your mouth.
the inconsistent casing of 'and then' is intentional,
matching the uneven heartbeat of survival,
this survival is sacred.
they are all small caps, because.
they were never bigger than me.
they were never so far above.
keeping everything lowercase
makes the brokenness holy.
it says: nothing is out of reach.
everything is made sacred in survival.
i name them how,
i name myself.
they kneel too.
amen.
amen.
amen in lowercase only.

NaPoWriMo 2025 (April 27th): Nothing endures but the whim of the breeze

From NaPoWriMo 2025 (Day Twenty Seven): Happy Sunday, everyone. I hope you find it to be a relaxing and inspiring day for writing poems.

Our featured participant for the day is Hayaathi – Goddess of Sehnsucht, whose first attempt at a sonnet brings a lovely blend of grief and self-deprecating humor.

Today’s daily resource is the online collection of the Harvard Art Museums, where you can find this bright and pretty drawing of a tulip poplar, a rather forbidding poster comparing various causes of death in Wisconsin, this beautiful jade paperweight, and much more.

And now for today’s optional prompt. W.H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” takes its inspiration from a very particular painting: Breughel’s “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.” Today we’d like to challenge you to write your own poem that describes a detail in a  painting, and that begins, like Auden’s poem, with a grand, declarative statement.

Happy writing!

Nothing endures but the whim of the breeze

The kingdoms of men crumble faster than a clover’s sigh.
In the painting, a man is tied to the cannon's yawning mouth —
forgotten now by the breeze that carries away screams like pollen.

Even walls remember our names.
In the corner, a boy stoops, unnoticed,
Plucking a single dandelion from the mud,
While armies sharpen swords nearby, deaf to the golden hush.
A peeling mural on a battered building
whispers of those who leaned and laughed here.

Empires may forget, but paint remembers where we leaned.

Hidden now by ivy:
a gold mine of raw, explosive, burning material,
laughing where no one sees.

Beneath the crumbling sunburst, a corner:
Two children, handprints smeared in blue,

History is carved by calloused hands:
a hammer, an exhausted eye, a soot-stained shirt button.

Walls crumble faster than promises:
a tiny kiss, cracked barbed wire, broken slogans.

Roots run deeper than exile:
a single corn stalk, a hummingbird, a mother’s weary glance.

Peace is the sharpest blade:
a child peeking from behind riot shields.

Dreams are stitched in daylight:
someone sewing a quilt, a window left ajar.

Color blooms where concrete crushes:
a tiny slingshot tucked into a belt.

Earth keeps the receipts of betrayal:
a river spirit hidden in a swirl, a cracked feather.

In the earth’s bitter marrow:
an arsenal of raw, explosive, burning roots,
a gold mine buried in betrayal.

Because political is personal.
It’s not some distant, sterile thing happening in suits and marble rooms:
It’s your grandmother’s missing land.
It’s the factory smoke in your lungs.
It’s the job you didn’t get because of your name.
It’s how your body is read (or misread) walking down the street.
It’s the mural you paint because you were never meant to survive,
the temple you build from broken, stained glass,
the arsenal hidden under the cobblestones.

History chews up its bravest children.
A lone sneaker dangles from a power line,
paint dripping down like blood.
I once wore shoes just like that,
running from a future sharpening knives for me,
running from a fate already closing its fists.

But tomorrow, barefoot, I will plant myself deeper, braver.

Empires die of amnesia.
No flag remembers the hands that sewed it.
On the mural’s cracked belly, a boy
traces his own face:
brown, wide-eyed, defiant:
beside the bullet holes they forgot to paint over.

He smiles like a sunrise they can't bomb away.
It was always political because it was always personal.

- Oizys.

Note: This poem was born from Vasily Vereshchagin’s 1884 painting, "Blowing from Guns in British India," which depicts the execution of Namdhari Sikhs by British colonial forces in 1872. In the scene, a man is tied to a cannon, seconds away from a death so brutal it was meant to be both punishment and spectacle. The silence was visible not in faces, but in posture, in the way soldiers stood, in the way the crowd blurred at the edges, anonymous and unmoving. I kept thinking how history doesn’t only survive in the monuments of the victors. It lives in the quiet places too: a child's handprint under ivy, a forgotten mural on a crumbling wall, a slingshot tucked into a belt. This poem is a small act of remembrance for the unnamed, the unnoticed, the ones the breeze could never quite erase.

NaPoWriMo 2025 (April 26th): Daughters of Dust and Diamonds

From NaPoWriMo 2025 (Day Twenty Six): We finally made it to the weekend, everyone! 

Today’s featured participant is Eden Ligon, whose “live concert” poem for Day Twenty-Five shows all the sweetness of music that has ripened with time.

Our daily resource is the online collection of Spain’s Reina Sofia Museum, which houses an incredible collection of modern and contemporary art. You can find Picassos aplenty here, of course, but also things like this vertiginous sculpture that makes me think of a rollercoaster, this mysterious Magritte, and this collaboration between Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

And now for our daily (optional) prompt. The word “sonnet” comes directly from the Italian sonetto, or “little song.” A traditional sonnet has a strict meter and rhyme scheme. It’s a strange form to have wormed its way into English, which is relatively unmetrical and rhyme-poor compared to Romance languages like Italian.

But thanks to William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, and others, the sonnet in English bloomed. It also became a sort of rite of passage for poets, with the Victorians especially loving very strict sonnets.

To refresh you on the “rules” of the traditional sonnet:

• 14 lines
• 10 syllables per line
• Those syllables are divided into five iambic feet. (An iamb is an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable). The word “admit” is a good example. In pronouncing it, you put more stress on the “mit” than the “ad.”
• Rhyme schemes vary, but the Shakespearean sonnet is abab cdcd efef gg (three quatrains followed by a concluding couplet).
• Sonnets are often thought of as not just little songs, but little essays, with the first six-to-eight or so lines building up a problem, the next four-to-six discussing it, and the last two-to-four coming to a conclusion.
• Given all these rules, it’s perhaps surprising that love poems make up quite a chunk of sonnets in English, but maybe that’s just because love poems make up quite a chunk of all poems in English?

If you want to intimidate yourself about poetry in general and sonnets in particular, read this quote from Saintsbury’s History of English Prosody.

To have something to say; to say it under pretty strict limits of form and very strict ones of space; to say it forcibly; to say it beautifully; these are the four great requirements of the poet in general; but they are never set so clearly, so imperatively, so urgently before any variety of poet as before the sonneteer.

And now, by way of illustration, let’s take a look at a few contemporary takes on the sonnet. The first, by Dan Beachy-Quick, is a pretty strict traditional sonnet. The next two –by Terrence Hayes and Alice Notley – are looser. And finally, the last one, by June Jordan, is a rather strict sonnet (rhyme- and meter-wise, though somewhat looser in line-specific syllable count) that doesn’t sound strict at all. It is joyfully informal in its language and tone.

After all this, here’s your prompt! Try your hand at a sonnet – or at least something “sonnet-shaped.” Think about the concept of the sonnet as a song, and let the format of a song inform your attempt. Be as strict or not strict as you want.

Happy writing!

Daughters of Dust and Diamonds

They clad us in silk, but stitched us in chains,
Our laughter bought with blood, our songs with sighs,
We wore their pleasures like embroidered stains,
A garden caged beneath a painted sky.

You crowned our throats with coins, not diadems,
Fed hunger with illusions of a throne,
Yet we, who danced within your stratagems,
Bent music till the very walls were stone.

No master's hand shall write our epitaph,
No borrowed tool shall build our freedom's flight,
We are the storm, the silence, and the laugh,
We break — we burn — we blaze — we birth — we fight.

Each daughter bears a hammer in her breast;
We raze your house to raise our own red crest.

- Oizys,
(The Sonneteeress)
[Since I learned the word "sonneteer" today. Please don't kill me. I won't use it again. Ha, ha.]

Note: This poem maintains the traditional sonnet structure: 14 lines with approximately 10 syllables each organized into three quatrains and a final couplet. It follows the Shakespearean rhyme scheme (abab cdcd efef gg). In my poem, the "E" rhymes (epitaph and laugh), are not perfect. They form a slant/near rhyme, which is common and accepted in English poetry. As for the iambic pentameter, I tried my best. Then I laughed and gave up! So now: Accuracy in iambic pentameter is about flow, not perfection. We honor the spirit of the meter, not enslave ourselves to it. Just like Lorde said: "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house." By breaking a few rules, I am actually adhering more closely to the theme of my poem: rebellion, reinvention, and radical self-construction (tool by tool, step by step).

NaPoWriMo 2025 (April 25th): Internal Concert {on hearing “labour” by Paris Paloma}

From NaPoWriMo 2025 (Day Twenty-Five): Happy final Friday of Na/GloPoWriMo, all.

Today’s featured participant is: [blank, Maureen?] Edited to add Maureen's edit: With apologies for the delay (I’m traveling, and just plain fell asleep last night before updating today’s post!), today’s featured participant is Wren Jones, who brings us a flashback to Springsteen in response to Day Twenty-Four’s making-music-together prompt.

Our daily resource is the online galleries of the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya, one of India’s foremost museums. It’s a pleasure to browse through the images here. I particularly liked these anklets that aren’t just jewelry but a sort of personal piggy bank, this portrait of the fabulously mustachioed J.M. Cursetjee, and this highly decorative flask, originally meant to hold gunpowder!

Finally, here is our optional prompt for the day. In her poem, senzo, Evie Shockley recounts the experience of being at a live concert, relating it the act of writing poetry. Today we’d like to challenge you to write a poem that recounts an experience of your own in hearing live music, and tells how it moves you. It could be a Rolling Stones concert, your little sister’s middle school musical, or just someone whistling – it just needs to be something meaningful to you.

Happy writing!

Some rambling: I’m on a sort-of-standby at work today, so I have some free time. My mother is already tired, and I’m sitting beside her as she snores softly. The sun is scorching outside. Our room is dark, shrouded by my makeshift curtains; her sarees pinned up to keep the heat from spilling in. Being from a small town, I’ve never been to a concert. Nobody comes here. But then again, if I were in a big one, would I even go? Probably not. I’d combust—figuratively speaking, of course. So when NaPoWriMo asked us to write about a live music experience, I hesitated. I’ve never stood in a crowd, never swayed to a stage light, never lost my voice screaming lyrics in unison. But I have sat alone in a room, headphones in, heart splitting open—completely undone by a song. “labour” by Paris Paloma did that to me. It wasn’t a concert in the traditional sense. It was something more intimate. More ancestral. A reckoning, a remembrance, a resurrection. What came out of that experience is the poem below—a gathering of voices, a choir of all the women I’ve known, been, read, imagined, inherited. This is the sound of them singing through me.

Internal Concert

{on hearing “labour” by Paris Paloma}

It begins quiet—

a thread of sound winding through the stillness.

I almost don’t notice it at first:

a single note, pressed gently

against the inside of my chest.

I sit still.

But something in me

leans forward.

Her voice arrives like memory—

familiar in ways I can’t explain.

Not mine alone,

but echoing with others.

I descend into imagination,

though it feels like inheritance.

Women I have known,

women I have been—

lined up like shadows at my back.

I carry their weight

in the hollows of my throat.

I have been passed down,

not broken,

but gathered.

It doesn’t play.

It summons.

A voice like smoke rising

from a bonfire of diaries.

As the verse deepens,

I feel that pull at the base of my spine—

as if a thousand women

are reaching for me,

through time,

through blood.

My mother,

her mother,

a friend with too much silence in her laugh,

a girl I once was—

all knees and apology,

the teacher who told me to speak up

but never made space for the answer,

the woman in the mirror at 3 a.m.,

eyeliner smudged, whispering “never again,”

the ones who left too soon,

the ones who stayed too long,

the ones who swallowed whole oceans

just to keep dinner quiet—

And then—

Draupadi, with her disrobed dignity.

Sita, walking through fire because silence was expected.

Radha, who loved and left anyway.

Yashodhara, the wife the Buddha left behind.

Tara, who vowed to never be born a man until suffering ends.

Pandora, blamed for the box, never praised for the hope left inside.

Eve, blamed for curiosity.

Lilith, the first woman who said no and left.

Kali, not evil—just unbothered about being liked.

Durga, with ten arms of fury.

Medusa, punished for surviving, not for sinning.

Phoolan Devi, bandit queen turned parliamentarian.

Savitribai Phule, who taught girls to read in secret.

Amrita Sher-Gil, who painted brown women in a white world.

Kamala Das, who wrote desire into the shape of a woman.

Ismat Chughtai, tried for obscenity, never for irrelevance.

Maya Angelou, whose caged bird still sings.

Malala, bullet in the head, book in the hand.

Simone de Beauvoir, mother of “women aren’t born, they’re made.”

The girl who was told to be careful but not to be free.

The aunt who never married and still sends blessings.

The maid who carries ten kilos of silence on her back.

The neighbor who cut her hair the day after he left.

The stranger crying in the auto, pretending she’s just tired.

The girl reading Rupi Kaur under her school desk.

The bride who didn’t smile in her wedding photo.

The widow who wears red when no one’s looking.

The woman at the police station who wasn’t believed.

The one who walked out in the middle of dinner.

The child who said “No” and was told “That’s not polite.”

Each of them—
bone and blaze, bangles and bruises,

myth and marrow, ancestor and ache,

truth and talisman, wound and weapon.

They are all here.

Watching.
Rooting.
Rising.

I’ve been passed down

like a hymn.

And now I’m the voice

singing this

in front of every man

who tried to hush the storm

by pretending it was drizzle.

It starts soft—

like a match strike in a dark hallway.

Her voice, quiet fury

dressed in silk and stormclouds.

She doesn’t ask me to listen.

She dares me not to.

Suddenly,

I’m not in this room anymore.

I’m in every memory

where I folded myself smaller

to make someone else

feel bigger.

The drums?

That’s the sound of my old anger

getting dressed for a reckoning.

The harmonies?

They’re every version of me

finally singing in sync.

We are no longer whisper.

We are all singing now.

In one voice.

In every voice.

Not for them—

but in front of them.

The song isn’t about heartbreak.

It’s about aftermath.

About gathering what’s left

and making it loud.

And though I’ve never stood

under a stage light,

here I am—

center stage,

mouth open,

throat full of centuries,

singing like I’ve been waiting

my whole life

to be heard,

as if I was born
with the breath
of a thousand silenced women.

I don’t clap.

I just sit there,

shaken

and stitched back together

by the echo of a woman

I’ve never met,

who somehow knows exactly

what broke. 

- Oizys.

{Paris Paloma - labour}