Today, our featured participant is Sunra Rainz, whose Roethke-inspired poem for Day Twenty has an irresistable and friendly rhythm.
Our daily resource is the Shanghai Museum, where you will find everything from a carved hairpin featuring two mustachioed fellows, to a hot-pink Taoist master, to a calligraphic ode to wine.
And now here’s our daily (optional) prompt. Sawako Nakayasu’s poem “Improvisational Score” is a rather surreal prose poem describing an imaginary musical piece that proceeds in a very unmusical way. Today, try your hand at writing your own poem in which something that normally unfolds in a set and well understood way — like a baseball game or dance recital – goes haywire, but is described as if it is all very normal.
Happy writing!
Backdrop: She boards the usual 8:03 hydra. Its scales smell faintly of burnt coffee and resignation. The conductor offers her a coupon for courage, buy one, get one dread. At the second stop, the ocean leaks in. Someone loses a shoe to a kraken. Nobody looks up from their phones. She scrolls past a meme of a minotaur in a cubicle. She laughs. She reaches your station, a cloud shaped like her childhood cat. She walks to the office barefoot, humming last week’s heartbreak like a long-forgotten national anthem.
(a quietly surreal travelogue)
She handed over her boarding pass made of pressed flowers and unspoken wishes.
“Purpose of visit?” they asked.
“To find the version of me who didn’t flinch.”
The agent nodded. “Gate 7. Watch out for nostalgia storms.”
Customs asked how many promises she’d broken.
She lost count at twelve. They let her through anyway.
The plane hummed like a lullaby.
Ran on middle-of-the-night regrets and the sighs of all the women who stayed.
The flight attendant asked for her dreams instead of a passport.
Stamped them gently with a smile that felt like déjà vu.
She ordered tea. It tasted like the poem she wrote at 19 and never showed anyone.
The seat beside her stayed empty —
reserved for the girl she used to be.
Each city spoke in the languages she invented as a child —
part hummingbird, part thunderstorm,
mostly longing.
In Florence, they spoke in rhymes.
In Baku, only in lullabies.
In every city, someone mistook her for someone they’d lost.
She apologized each time, though she didn’t know why.
Her suitcase arrived full of echoes.
"Come back soon," "Why not now?" "Do you remember me?"
She folded them carefully. Placed them in drawers like scarves.
Every time she unpacked, she found the things she almost said —
still warm, still waiting.
Every hotel room contained a different version of her —
some older, some braver, one still seventeen and furious.
They nodded at each other. Sometimes they left notes.
Once, they all cried together. Quietly. As if it were part of the check-in process.
Each hotel mirror offered a different reflection.
One smiled. One wept. One looked away.
Currency varied by emotion.
A deep belly laugh bought her dinner.
A whispered “I miss you” got her a cab ride.
Guilt, however, cost everything.
She traveled for years like that.
Not measuring distance in kilometers, but in silences.
Not tracking time, but weight —
how light she felt in each place,
how heavy the return.
She traveled for years like that.
Not measuring distance in kilometers, but in silences.
Not tracking time, but weight —
how light she felt in each place,
how heavy the return.
Until one night, in a nameless city with fog that smelled like old paper,
she reached for her suitcase—
and found it empty.
No almost-said things. No folded echoes.
Just lint. A crumpled receipt.
A boarding pass with no name.
Her name — forgotten, or never written.
She stood there, blinking, in the hotel hallway.
The other versions of her gone.
The mirror showed only the wallpaper behind her.
And for the first time,
she wasn’t sure she’d ever left at all.
- Oizys.
[Note: This is a sort-of-sequel to my previous post's poem companion.]
