NaPoWriMo 2025 (April 18th): Ghost Notes on Highway 17

From NaPoWriMo 2025 (Day Eighteen): We’re three Fridays down, with just one left to go in this year’s National/Global Poetry Writing Month!

Our featured participant for the day is Poems by Sidra, where the surrealist-inspired poem of friendship for Day Seventeen rocks some fantastic similes — it’s all about those teeth!

Today’s resource is a virtual visit to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Gardner, who died in 1924, was a devoted and very wealthy art collector who built a Venetian-style palace (in Boston) to house her treasures. The museum building is beautiful and well known for its gorgeous courtyard. But the Gardner is also well known for having been the unfortunate site of one of the greatest – and still unsolved – art heists of all time. If you can figure out whodunnit, there might be $10 million in it for you.

And now for today’s (optional) prompt. Like our villanelle prompt from a week ago, this prompt plays around with song lyrics, but in a very specific context – singing while riding in a car. Take a look at Ellen Bass’s poem, “You’re the Top.” Now, craft your own poem that recounts an experience of driving/riding and singing, incorporating a song lyric.

Happy writing!

Ghost Notes on Highway 17
(for a friend I couldn’t follow)

The road unspools like grief—
long, grey, and echoing.
You drive.
I hum along.

It’s raining, the kind that smudges
the edges of trees and memories,
and the wipers keep time
with the ache in my chest.

"And I will always love you…"

You didn’t mean for me to hear it—
a whisper sung half-hearted,
tangled in static,
soft as regret.

I look out, pretend the world
is more interesting
than the silence settling in
between your hands on the wheel.

You had that look again—
the one where you're already
somewhere else entirely,
where I can’t follow.

We pass that diner where we once
argued over dumpling soup
and dared each other to drink up momo sauce,
laughing like kids with no bedtime.

Now the laughter's gone.
You reach for the dial,
turn the volume down,
and with it, the last piece of us.

"Bittersweet memories…"

Your voice cracks,
but you don’t stop singing.
And I don’t cry.
Not until the bridge.

You pull off the road,
not to talk—
just to sit.
Rain thunders on the roof like all the words
we’ll never say.

I want to ask if we’re still okay.
I want to scream it over the chorus.

But instead, I press my forehead
against the window,
watch the world drip down
like mascara on a day too hard to hold.

And in the quiet,
the song ends.

So do we—quietly, like the song never mattered.

- Oizys.