NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 8] - it was nothing serious

NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 8]

Day Eight

Happy second Wednesday of Na/GloPoWriMo, everybody!

Today’s featured participant is Smita Vyas Kumar, whose response to Day Seven’s clapping/skipping prompt is a social media-themed poem that is very easy to imagine jumping rope to!

Our resource for the day is the University of Iowa International Writing Program’s “MOOC Packs” courses on How Writers Write Poetry I, and How Writers Write Poetry II. These free, online courses take you through all manner of poetic techniques, with suggested exercises and readings.

And now, here’s our optional prompt for the day! In his poem, “Poet, No Thanks,” Jean D’Amérique repeats the phrase “I wasn’t a poet” multiple times, while describing other things that he instead claims to have been. In your poem for today, use a simple phrase repeatedly, and then make statements that invert or contradict that phrase.

Happy writing!

-

note: my keyboard died this morning in either protest or prophecy. i suppose even objects have thresholds. so, courtesy of a rude little offering from the universe, i wrote this on my phone with both thumbs and a bad temper. i guess, the keyboard stopped first and the news had already done its job.

it was nothing serious

it was nothing serious,
just a sentence
coming in after dark
to sit on the edge of the bed
with its shoes on

just a sentence,
creased and ironed,
with the manners of a knife

nothing serious,
the kettle still knew what to do with itself
the sink still held last night’s cups
someone somewhere still unclipped bras from clotheslines
still salted cucumbers
still replied haha to something unforgivable

my mind, however,
went out like a bad bulb
and stayed there a while,
warm at the base, useless at the mouth,
like a prayer with nowhere decent to go

that was all

in the morning
i sat down to write
and my keyboard entered the afterlife

not all at once
first a letter
then another
then the whole small jaw of it
clenched shut
as if even the alphabet
had developed a conscience overnight
as if the letters had seen too much
and were lying face down inside themselves

it was nothing serious,
just keys refusing their little obediences
just a cheap machine discovering character
just me pressing harder
as though force had ever been a language of rescue

i did all the rituals
unplugged
replugged
cussed at it like a widow in a doorway
stared at my own reflection
in the black between keys

nothing serious,
only that stupid private humiliation
of needing one object
and not having a second one
or a third
or the kind of money that makes failure decorative
no sleek spare device sleeping nearby,
no elegant backup plan,
just me and the mean little theatre
of making do
again
as though endurance were a hobby
and not a tax

outside, the day kept misbehaving normally
a child dragged a schoolbag down the lane of morning
someone bought coriander
someone shook a rug into the sun
someone laughed from a balcony
with their full throat

i almost hated them for it,
that easy animal sound,
that unbroken ribbon of living

but hatred is expensive
and i was already spending enough
just to remain a person by breakfast

and somewhere else
no, not somewhere else
in the same world, embarrassingly,
that is the filth of it
not in some myth-country made for headlines,
but in this same stitched and sweating world
where one woman rinses rice
while another counts the windows twice
where one hand powders a child’s neck
while another learns the weight
of leaving quickly
people were holding their walls together
with their listening
people were doing that ancient human thing:
standing very still
inside the radius of a sentence

it was nothing serious
not fire yet
not the cupboard of sky kicked open
not the clean white plate learning
what ash is

just a sentence
saying an entire people could be erased
with the casual wrist of a man
who will still sleep on linen
who will still have water brought to him,
still have his collars obeyed,
still be called strategic
instead of haunted

nothing serious,
which is why the spoons looked stunned
why the window felt temporary
why even the dust
seemed to have received instructions
why the house felt briefly borrowed,
why every ordinary object
stood in its place too carefully,
as if waiting to be counted

by afternoon i gave up
and opened the smaller glass coffin
the one that glows in the palm

wrote with my thumbs
like a punished schoolgirl of the apocalypse
bent over that lit rectangle
like it was a small sanctioned fire
like it might warm me
or tell the truth
or at least not die
before i was done

letter by letter
the screen kept offering me words
with that vulgar little helpfulness
predictive text
trying to finish the end of the world for me
offering neat little next words
as if this were only inconvenience,
as if the body could be autosaved,
as if dread were just another typo

it was nothing serious

only language

only the old trick
of making annihilation sound administrative
of placing death in a sentence
and buttoning the collar over it

only language,

as though language were not
how the ceiling begins
to come down

as though language were not
the first clean glove
placed over the hand

as though language were not
how the air is thinned in advance,
how the plate is cleared,
how the bed is turned down
for the unthinkable

as though language were not
the softest part of the door
giving way

~ Oizys.

edited to add this afternote: this prompt stayed with me for reasons beyond the repetition. there is something unsettlingly familiar about a phrase that keeps denying itself, then reveals a different truth beneath it. i think a lot of us live that way in ordinary life that's misnamed, half-translated, known only in the most convenient proportions. people around me know that i write. but in the domesticated and useful sense. they know i care about language. they know i can be trusted with a title, a message, a bio, a careful sentence, a catchy headline. what they do not know is the scale on which words take hold of me. they do not know that language has been, for me, a far less tidy occupation. they do not know how thoroughly i disappear into them, or how much of my inner life has been built in rooms like this one, under another name - oizys. they do not know is that words do not behave with me. they overtake, stain and they build entire private weather systems under the skin. they do not know the extent of it, the hours, the secrecy, the strange private severity of it. they do not know that under one name i am legible, and under another i am more fully made of sentences. they know i use words well, they do not know words use me back. perhaps that is one reason this prompt found me where it did. the repeated phrase [“I wasn’t a poet”] felt less like a device and more like a way of living near a hidden self: not exactly lying, not exactly confessing, but circling something too charged to say plainly. oizys, after all, has always known more than i admit elsewhere.