NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 20] - The Animal of Oizys

NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 20]

Day Twenty

Hello, everyone, and welcome back for Day Twenty of Na/GloPoWriMo. We’re heading into the home stretch now!

Our featured participant today is M. Jay Dixit, who brings us a poignant trio of flowers in response to Day 19’s florilegium prompt.

Today’s featured resource is a YouTube-based course in how to “close read” poetry. In other words, how to do a focused analysis of a poem. It can be very helpful not just if you’re trying to write a paper for school or something along those lines, but if you’re a poet trying to figure out how a particular poem does what it does, so you can recognize and replicate those tactics in your own work.

And now, for our daily (optional) prompt! Start by reading the poem below, written by Carl Phillips:

Black Swan on Water

Seen this way,
through that lens where need
and wanting swim at random

toward each other, away again, and
now and then together, he moves less like
a swan—black, or otherwise—than like any

man for whom sex is, or has at last become,
an added sense by which to pass ungently but more
entirely across a life where, in between the silences,

he leaves what little he’s got to show for himself
behind him in braids of water, green-to-blue wake of
Please and Don’t hurt me and You can see I’m hurt, already.

You may not realize it at first, but the poem is a single sentence! The three-line stanzas mimic the “braids in water” in the penultimate line, and the way the lines get longer and longer also makes the poem as a whole look a bit like the widening wake that a swan leaves as it swims.

For today, try writing your own poem that uses an animal that shows up in myths and legends as a metaphor for some aspect of a contemporary person’s life. Include one spoken phrase.

Happy writing!

-

The Animal of Oizys

for Oizys,
who has no sacred animal,
so I made her one.

Goat-thing of sorrow,
night-fed, sure-footed,
kept in the dark pen
behind the house of Oizys.

Goat-bodied, they mean,
though they prefer other names:
specimen, vessel,
proof that misery can be useful.

They keep me for what I make.

Not the body;
that they call excessive,
difficult,
prone to rumor;

but the small, hard things
I gather without meaning to,
layer by layer,
from what should have killed me.

A concretion, they might say.
A foreign body.
A useful formation
recovered from the gut.

In older legends,
it was the mountain goat
they cut open for such miracles,
never the hands that fed it poison.

Once, they named me monster.
It made the procedure easier to explain.

Now they come in quiet lines,
palms open,
offering up their poisons
with a kind of practiced grief.

I take them in.
What else is there to do
with a mouth trained to swallow?

Inside, something patient begins—
a binding agent,
a slow accretion,
harm compacted to remedy.

In the old apothecaries
they would have prized it:
this little sealed antidote,
this calculus of survival.

When it is finished,
they hold out their hands again.

“Is it safe?” one of them asks.

I place in the waiting palm
the small, dense answer,
cool as a stone,
cleaned of its history.

I have learned
to make a cure of it.

I have not learned
how to keep any for myself.

~ Oizys.