NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 11] - weekend erasure

NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 11]

Day Eleven

We made it to the weekend, everyone, and to the eleventh day of Na/GloPoWriMo!

Today’s featured participant is A.J.S., who brings us a mysterious and surreal response to Day Nine’s grief prompt.

Our resource for the day is Frank Skinner’s poetry podcast. Here, the English comedian and actor analyzes his favorite poems and interviews contemporary poets.

And now for today’s (optional) prompt! Erasure poetry — also known as blackout poetry — is written by taking an existing text and erasing or blacking out individual words. Here’s a great explainer with examples, and you’ll find another here. Some folks have written whole books of erasures/blackouts, including Chase Berggrun’s R E D (which is based on Dracula), Jen Bervin’s Nets (which is based on Shakespeare’s sonnets), and what is one of the grand-daddies of erasures as a form, Ronald Johnson’s Radi Os (which is based on Paradise Lost). Today, we’d like to challenge you to write your own erasure/blackout poem. You could use a page from a favorite book, a magazine, what have you. It can be especially fun to play with a book you don’t know, particularly one that deals with an unfamiliar topic. If you’d like to go that route, maybe you’ll find something of interest in the thousands of scanned books at the Internet Archive? Feel free to maintain the whitespace of the original text (as is traditional for erasures/blackouts . . . if anything can be called traditional about them) or to pluck words/phrases from your chosen source material and rearrange them.

Happy writing (or erasing!)

-

weekend erasure

we made it
to the weekend

the sink was already full
of Friday’s plates
and someone had lowered their voice
before naming a city

the kettle clicked off.
someone rinsed rice twice.

the radio kept failing
between prayer time and numbers
somebody’s aunt called from the south
and nobody said stay safe.

someone checked the window latch
as if glass had ever kept
history out.

the same hand had folded school uniforms
and counted medicine strips
by torchlight once before.

mysterious
surreal
the day folded laundry
over its own bad news.

a phone lit the table.

Tyre. Haifa. Gaza. Tehran.
names crossing the tablecloth
like spilled tea nobody cleaned at once.

not a headline exactly,
more the way a hand
stayed too long over the screen,
then reached for coriander,
salt, the chipped blue cup.

favorite poems, yes,
but also the hiss of oil,
the neighbour shaking a rug,
a child called in before dark,
the ball was left downstairs
the sandals came back dusted white
no one asked why the game ended early.
a basil plant leaning
toward whatever light
had not yet learned
to call itself fire.
and still the leaves were pinched
for dinner.

written by taking
an existing text
and erasing
individual words:

border
shelter
ceasefire
corridor
south
civilian
aid
struck
family
again
flour
signal
balcony
insulin
neighbor

some folks
have written
whole books.

some women
have only written
shopping lists:

tea
soap
lentils
batteries
bread
yeast
candles
baby syrup
bandages
charger wire
parsley
gas refill
batteries
bleach
one more packet of salt

today
write your own
from a page
you do not know
well enough
to survive inside.

maintain the whitespace
between siren and saucepan.
between the chopping board
and the breaking news banner
pluck words
from the broadcast,
from the cupboard,
from the unanswered message.

rearrange them
until the room admits
it is connected.

happy writing,
or erasing...

but leave
the weekend there,

where someone still waters
the windowsill plant
with the concentration of prayer,
while elsewhere—
no, here too—

someone is still braiding a child’s hair
someone is still soaking lentils
someone is still listening
for the second sound

evening enters houses
through what was supposed
to hold.

~ Oizys.