NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 30] - Archivists of Lost Girls or, The People Who Remove Childhoods

NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 30]

Day Thirty

Well, it’s happened again. We’ve come to the last day of another National/Global Poetry Writing Month. We’ll be back tomorrow with a final featured participant and some housekeeping details, but in the meantime, congratulations to all who have made it to the end! And if your output has tapered off or been spotty — no worries! The best thing about Na/GloPoWriMo is that every day you write a poem, you get a poem-shaped prize.

Our featured participant today is words with ruth, where you’ll find a complex, tender response to Day 29’s past-and-present prompt.

Our final feature resource is poet and professor Judy Jordan’s YouTube videos covering individual poems and discussing poetic craft.

And now, here’s this year’s final (optional) prompt. In his poem, “Angels,” Russell Edson speaks of these spiritual warrior-messenger-guardians as if they were a type of endangered animal. Brief as it is, the poem is disorienting in its use of flattened diction, odd similes, and elliptical statements. Today, try writing your own poem that discusses a real or mythical being or profession (demons, firefighters, demonic firefighters) with the same sort of musing yet dispassionate tone.

Happy writing!

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My offering for Day Thirty. My final offering of this year: 

Archivists of Lost Girls
or, The People Who Remove Girlhoods

The people who remove girlhoods do not wear uniforms.
This is one reason they are difficult to report.
They arrive gradually, like mildew, or relatives.

At first, they only take the unnecessary things:
the belief that adults know what they are doing,
the habit of sleeping without strategy,
the blue eraser shaped like a fruit
nobody can identify anymore.

They are careful workers.
They do not remove the whole girlhood in one afternoon.
That would be inefficient and might attract birds.

Instead, they begin with the corners.

A birthday becomes a budget.
A classroom becomes a ranking.
A body becomes a subject
people discuss in lowered voices.

Later, they return for the larger furniture:
the fearless laugh,
the unlicensed hunger,
the talent for asking questions
without apologising first.

By then, the childgirl has usually learned to help them.

She folds her own brightness.
She labels the boxes.
She says,
No, no, it is fine,
I was going to become careful anyway.

There are museums where removed girlhoods are kept.

No one has found them.

Some say they are stored under government buildings.
Some say inside mothers.
Some say they migrate at night in the mouths of street dogs.

The archivists of lost girls work mostly underground.

This is not symbolic.

The rent is cheaper there, and sorrow keeps better without sunlight.
They are a small profession, with poor chairs and excellent handwriting.
Their work involves cataloguing the girls who misplaced themselves
between instruction and obedience, 
between the first blood and the first apology for taking up space.

Each girl is assigned a number, a weather condition,
and one object found near the disappearance.
Ribbon.
Trinkets box.
Library card.
Half a guava.
A sock with the elastic gone.

The archivists do not speculate.
Speculation leads to poetry, and poetry leads to funding cuts.

Instead, they write:
Subject last seen laughing without lowering her voice.
Subject last seen believing the body was private property.
Subject last seen asking why three times in one afternoon.

These are considered high-risk behaviours.
There are shelves for the girls who became useful.
There are drawers for the girls who became quiet.
There is a locked cabinet for the girls who became mothers 
before becoming themselves.

No one opens it without gloves.

The people who remove girlhoods deny everything.
They point to photographs as evidence.
See?, they say. There she is, smiling.
This is considered a strong defence.

At the back of the archive
sits Oizys,
minor goddess of grief, anxiety, and other inherited furniture.

She is not the director.
This is a common mistake.

She is only the woman who stamps each file
RECEIVED
in red ink and sometimes, when nobody is watching,
adds:
STILL BREATHING.

The archivists dislike this.
It is not standard practice.

Hope, like mould, spreads through paper if left unattended.

Occasionally, however, a grown woman will be found
standing in a stationery shop, holding a packet of glitter pens
with unnecessary tenderness.
Or crying because a school bell rang in a movie.
Or buying mango candy from a man on a bicycle
though she has no girl with her and no reasonable explanation.

These incidents are rare but significant.
They suggest that removal is never complete.
They suggest that somewhere inside the adult
a small illegal person is still refusing evacuation.

The people who remove girlhoods are aware of this problem.
It keeps them awake. Not from guilt.
From professional concern.

Once a year, usually in April, a grown woman arrives asking to see her own file.

The archivists are polite.
They offer tea in a cup labelled
EVIDENCE.
They explain that lost girls are not returned to the public
without proper identification.

The woman produces a scar, three unfinished songs,
a fear of raised voices, and the exact smell of her school corridor after rain.
The archivists confer.
This is often enough.

Sometimes, from a box marked
MISCELLANEOUS LIGHT,
they return to her, one laugh, creased but usable.
One question with its teeth intact.
One small, illegal hunger.
The woman signs where indicated.

Oizys watches from the back desk,
chewing the end of a government pencil.

She knows the archive is incomplete.
This is why she keeps writing.

~ Oizys.

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And a note I wrote to mark the ending of NaPoWriMo 2026: 30th April 2026, after the rain, when the April ends.

Thank you to everyone who read, visited, commented, and left a little light in this otherwise quiet corner of the internet. For one month, this weblog became a village again... noisy with poems, grief, jokes, weather, witness, and strange little offerings. May our paths meet again next year.