1st May, 2026. 08:10 PM.
Maureen has posted the final housekeeping note. Which means it is official now. April has been packed into boxes, the prompts have been swept from the floor, the links are still warm, the comment threads are still glowing faintly, and somewhere, thirty poems are lying around in my blog like guests who refused to leave before breakfast. Na/GloPoWriMo is over. Every year, this feels strange. For most of the year, my weblog is a quiet corner of the internet. A room with one chair, one flickering tube light, one stubborn spider, and me, rearranging my feelings badly. Then April comes. Suddenly, the room becomes a village. People arrive with their poems, their griefs, their jokes, their gods, their dead, their weather reports, their strange little mythical professions. Someone sets up a stall of metaphors. Someone brings a basket of crows. Someone arrives late with a mermaid. Someone is crying near the mangoes. Someone has misplaced a childhood and is filling out the correct form. For one month, we read each other. What a small sentence. What a large mercy. Thank you, Maureen, for building this temporary country every year. Thank you for the prompts, the resources, the patience, the housekeeping, the doors left open. And thank you to everyone who stopped by here, read, commented, left a line, carried a line away, or simply passed through quietly. You made this weird, little weblog less lonely. May has begun now. The village has not vanished exactly. It has only folded itself into pockets, bookmarks, drafts, names we will search for next year. And perhaps, before next April, I may wander into dVerse too! A poetry space Maggie (a fellow Na/GloPoWriMo poet!) kindly introduced me to. Maybe there will be other prompts, other doors, other rooms where words gather and refuse to behave. Until then, may poetry find us where we are hiding. See you next April.
08:50PM.
Also, because April has left me with too many names to lose, I have started a separate register on my Junkyard of Readees page: Fellow Na/GloPoWriMo Good Poetry Co-Citizens [as said by Maureen herself!]. A small roll call of poets, prompt-survivors, comment-leavers, line-barterers, and temporary neighbours from the April poetry village. Some read me. Some I read. Some left lamps in the comments. Some wrote poems I am still carrying. So I am keeping their names there, like pressed flowers, like forwarding addresses, like proof that the village happened. It is an ever-growing register, so I will keep adding names as I find them, remember them, and follow their little lanterns back through April.
~ Oizys.
Showing posts with label NaPoWriMo 2026. Show all posts
Showing posts with label NaPoWriMo 2026. Show all posts
Friday, May 1, 2026
1st May 2026, after the village folds itself away
Thursday, April 30, 2026
30th April 2026, after the rain, when the April ends
30th April 2026. 8:30 PM.
It is a different kind of pain. The whole day I was so busy with work, I forgot today was the last day of April. In the few minutes I got between tasks, I scrolled past the same posts on social media: April is ending, May May is kind to us. And then, between one soft farewell to April and another, the news: the Gaza-bound Global Sumud Flotilla had been intercepted in international waters near Crete, its boats seized, its people detained, its attempt at aid folded once again into the old settler-colonial machinery of force. So there it was: people asking May to be gentle, while somewhere on the sea, gentleness was being boarded by armed men.
In the same scroll, I found Coffees for Gaza, asking people for the price of a coffee, which is such a small and devastating unit of measure. A coffee. A coffee: that small office sacrament, that bitter little permission slip to continue. The thing we buy while answering emails, while refreshing dashboards, while telling ourselves we are tired. The thing we hold while answering emails and pretending the world is not on fire. Somewhere, that same amount becomes rice, medicine, a little time, a family not being abandoned completely. This is the vulgarity of distance: our caffeine, someone else’s survival. So, if you can, give one small coffee’s worth away; let it become something warmer than habit.Well. Finally, after work, in the evening, there was a sudden thunderstorm. Unreasonably justified. Violent wind, lightning, and then an orgasmic rain. It unfurled into something wilder while my mother and I struggled to rescue our clothes from the balcony. Later, my mother brought news from downstairs: the dome over the gate light had flown away, and the bulb had been thrown inward, as if even electricity had briefly lost its manners. Since then, it has been cooler. Calmer. My belly, however, is jealous due to its gaseous nature right now, which is to say, even my stomach has chosen metaphor today. Everything inside me is rearranging itself with unnecessary drama. The rain has stopped now, but the trees are still behaving like they know a secret. The streetlight outside has turned the wet road into something almost holy, which is rude of it, frankly, because I am not in the mood for holiness. I am in the mood for lying down like a historical ruin and being discovered centuries later by archaeologists who say, ah yes, here we see the remains of a woman who answered too many emails. April ended while I was working. NaPoWriMo almost ended while I was working. This feels like betrayal, but not by April. By myself, perhaps. Or by adulthood, that badly managed institution. I spent the last day of a month that asked me to write every day staring at dashboards, messages, tasks, little boxes of urgency multiplying like damp insects. Somewhere in between, people were posting their tender farewells to April, asking May to be gentle, kind, soft, bearable. And I, professional fool, scrolled past them like a clerk at the border of feeling. Only later, when the wind began throwing itself against the windows, did I remember. Oh. Today is the last day. The month is leaving. I had imagined I would notice it properly. That I would sit with tea, maybe. That I would look back at thirty poems and feel something cinematic and clean. Closure, perhaps. A word invented by people who have never owned a nervous system. Instead, there was thunder. There was the sky losing patience. There was rain arriving with the kind of confidence I have only seen in women who have finally had enough. And then, suddenly, coolness. As if the world had been slapped and forgiven in the same minute. I stood there listening to it, and for once, I did not try to make it useful. Not a poem, not a lesson, not evidence. Just rain. Just the last evening of April arriving late to its own farewell, drunk on lightning, smelling of wet dust and bad decisions.
NaPoWriMo is a temporary room. For one month, my little weblog, which otherwise sits like an empty corner of the internet with one tube light flickering bravely above it, becomes part of a village. People arrive. They read. They leave small lamps in the form of comments. They say, I was here. I saw this. I carried this line away. It is the only festival my weblog knows. A strange annual fair where everyone puts up a stall made of drafts and panic, where we bring our unfinished metaphors, our stubborn griefs, our weather reports, our dead, our jokes, our gods, our badly behaved childhoods. We barter words. We trade courage. We taste each other’s strange little offerings and say, yes, this has salt, this has smoke, this burned my tongue a little, thank you. And then, as suddenly as it began, the stalls come down. The room empties. The village goes back to being scattered houses with blue-lit windows. But for a month, there was company. For a month, this empty corner had footsteps and the silence had witnesses. For that, I am grateful.
Maybe this is the correct ending? Perhaps, not a grand summation or some neat little ribbon around the month. Just work, weather, a jealous belly, and the old body continuing its strange negotiations with air. April did not end like a door closing. It ended like a storm passing through a tired city and leaving the rooms cooler than before. And maybe that is enough? Maybe May does not need to be kind. Maybe it only needs to leave one window unlatched, one evening unruined, one small hour in which I remember that I am not only the person who works, worries, digests poorly, and scrolls past tenderness. I am also the person who notices rain. Late, perhaps. But still.
~ Oizys.
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!
-
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.
-
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.
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!
-
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.
-
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.
Wednesday, April 29, 2026
29th April 2026. 9:57 PM.
29th April 2026. 9:57 PM.
Tomorrow is the last day of NaPoWriMo. Last year, I remember writing a more openly heartfelt closing post. This year, I do not know yet what kind of ending this April will allow. It has been hotter, angrier, more interrupted, more crowded with news, rooms, bodies, windows, and small refusals. So I am preparing this tonight and leaving the door open for tomorrow’s mood to enter.
This April contained: windows left open against instruction, sirens, a cup with tea-darkened edges, pasta, news alerts, mother’s voice in the kitchen, father’s lunchbox, shoulder carrying yesterday’s argument, crows, heat, unfinished sentences, poems posted late, comments from strangers who became a temporary room, one notebook pretending not to know how much of the month it has swallowed, the strange daily embarrassment of still wanting language to do something, and the small stubborn ritual of returning to the page anyway.
And then there was one. I do not know yet what April has made of me this year, except that I kept showing up, late sometimes, tired often, but here. Maybe that is not a victory. Maybe it is just attendance. But some months ask for attendance like proof of life.
So I am preparing this tonight and leaving space for tomorrow’s prompt, tomorrow’s mood, and whatever weather the room decides to bring. Maybe the final poem will be gratitude. Maybe it will be exhaustion. Maybe it will be one more inventory of what survived.
For now: one more night before the last poem.
There is still the country, refreshing itself with the confidence of a bad machine. There are still people elsewhere being counted badly or not at all. There are still people elsewhere being counted badly or not at all. There is still the poem, which does not save them, which does not save me, which has the decency not to lie about this. But it remains on the table. A small stubborn object. A witness with ink on its hands.
Tomorrow is the last day of NaPoWriMo. Last year, I remember writing a more openly heartfelt closing post. This year, I do not know yet what kind of ending this April will allow. It has been hotter, angrier, more interrupted, more crowded with news, rooms, bodies, windows, and small refusals. So I am preparing this tonight and leaving the door open for tomorrow’s mood to enter.
This April contained: windows left open against instruction, sirens, a cup with tea-darkened edges, pasta, news alerts, mother’s voice in the kitchen, father’s lunchbox, shoulder carrying yesterday’s argument, crows, heat, unfinished sentences, poems posted late, comments from strangers who became a temporary room, one notebook pretending not to know how much of the month it has swallowed, the strange daily embarrassment of still wanting language to do something, and the small stubborn ritual of returning to the page anyway.
And then there was one. I do not know yet what April has made of me this year, except that I kept showing up, late sometimes, tired often, but here. Maybe that is not a victory. Maybe it is just attendance. But some months ask for attendance like proof of life.
So I am preparing this tonight and leaving space for tomorrow’s prompt, tomorrow’s mood, and whatever weather the room decides to bring. Maybe the final poem will be gratitude. Maybe it will be exhaustion. Maybe it will be one more inventory of what survived.
For now: one more night before the last poem.
There is still the country, refreshing itself with the confidence of a bad machine. There are still people elsewhere being counted badly or not at all. There are still people elsewhere being counted badly or not at all. There is still the poem, which does not save them, which does not save me, which has the decency not to lie about this. But it remains on the table. A small stubborn object. A witness with ink on its hands.
NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 29] - After Opening the Same Window
NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 29]
Day Twenty-Nine
Happy Wednesday, all, and happy penultimate day of National/Global Poetry Writing Month!
Our featured participant for the day is Sunra Rainz, whose response to Day 28’s six-line-poem prompt reminds us to seize the day (and wear the dress).
Today’s resource is The Poetry Exchange podcast. Each episode not only explores a different poem, it discusses why that particular poem has been a “friend” to a particular interviewee.
Finally, here’s today’s prompt (optional, as always). In “After Turning the Clocks Back,” Jennifer Moxley links present with past, using a few well-placed details to invoke both a sense of the daily “now” and a nostalgic sense of the speaker’s long-ago life. In your poem today, similarly compare your everyday present life with your past self, using specific details to conjure aspects of your past and present in the reader’s mind.
Happy writing!
-
Note: Firstly, thank you to every single one of you who appreciated by poem yesterday. I will definitely find some time to respond to all of you. Now. Day Twenty-Nine asked us to compare our everyday present life with our past self, using specific details from both the daily now and the long-ago then. Since this is the penultimate poem of April, I suppose it is only fair that the month has started asking for evidence: who were you, who are you, and what, exactly, has been misplaced between the two? So here is my offering for Day Twenty-Nine:
After Opening the Same Window
Today, I open the window
before the room can become an argument.
Heat enters first, then the neighbour’s mixer,
then a motorbike, then one crow
with the confidence of a minor official.
My laptop is already awake,
blue-lit and accusing.
The inbox has multiplied overnight
like a rumour with funding.
On the table: one steel glass,
one half-finished cup of tea,
one notebook pretending it is not judging me,
one phone carrying the world’s fresh injuries
in a font designed for convenience and aesthetics.
This is my life now:
checking the news before brushing my hair,
answering emails with a body
that has become very good
at storing weather and warning
in the same shoulder.
But once, I was a girl
who thought morning meant only morning.
Once, I sharpened pencils
with a red plastic sharpener
over the dustbin
and believed the curled shavings
were proof that something useful
could come from being reduced.
Once, my schoolbag smelled
of tiffin, pencil box, raincoat plastic,
and the faint metallic panic
of unfinished homework.
I wore two tight plaits
that mother braided
and carried a water bottle
that leaked into my books
like a small private monsoon.
I thought the future
would arrive properly dressed.
I thought adulthood meant
a table of one’s own,
a clean cup,
a door that closed,
and nobody asking
why one’s face looked like that.
Now I have the table.
Now I have the cup.
The door closes badly.
The face has become evidence.
The girl I was
stands in the corner sometimes,
still in her uniform,
still holding a compass box
with one broken hinge.
She watches me read about another city
being turned into smoke
while the pressure cooker whistles
as if nothing has happened
because something is always happening
and lunch must still be made.
She asks, is this the future?
I tell her, yes, unfortunately,
but look, we still keep notebooks.
She asks, did we become brave?
I tell her, not exactly.
We became observant,
which is less heroic
but harder to confiscate.
She asks, did we learn to speak?
I tell her, sometimes.
Often late.
Often after the room has emptied.
Often with the window open,
so the sentence has somewhere to go.
Outside, the crow has returned
to inspect the railing.
Inside, the tea has darkened.
The laptop waits.
The country refreshes itself
without apology.
I pick up the cup.
Somewhere in me,
the girl with the leaking bottle
and homework panic
leans closer.
She wants to know
if we are happy.
I want to be honest,
but not cruel.
So I say:
we are still here.
I say:
we have become the kind of woman
who opens the window anyway.
I say:
we no longer mistake morning
for innocence,
but sometimes,
before the first notification,
before the heat fully enters,
before the day files its charges,
there is still a second
when the light touches the floor
like an old friend
who remembers our name.
~ Oizys.
After-note: The penultimate poem. Strange little word, penultimate. It sounds like something wearing spectacles and carrying bad news politely. A postman? One more day after this. One more window. One more attempt to make April give back at least some of what it has taken.
Day Twenty-Nine
Happy Wednesday, all, and happy penultimate day of National/Global Poetry Writing Month!
Our featured participant for the day is Sunra Rainz, whose response to Day 28’s six-line-poem prompt reminds us to seize the day (and wear the dress).
Today’s resource is The Poetry Exchange podcast. Each episode not only explores a different poem, it discusses why that particular poem has been a “friend” to a particular interviewee.
Finally, here’s today’s prompt (optional, as always). In “After Turning the Clocks Back,” Jennifer Moxley links present with past, using a few well-placed details to invoke both a sense of the daily “now” and a nostalgic sense of the speaker’s long-ago life. In your poem today, similarly compare your everyday present life with your past self, using specific details to conjure aspects of your past and present in the reader’s mind.
Happy writing!
-
Note: Firstly, thank you to every single one of you who appreciated by poem yesterday. I will definitely find some time to respond to all of you. Now. Day Twenty-Nine asked us to compare our everyday present life with our past self, using specific details from both the daily now and the long-ago then. Since this is the penultimate poem of April, I suppose it is only fair that the month has started asking for evidence: who were you, who are you, and what, exactly, has been misplaced between the two? So here is my offering for Day Twenty-Nine:
After Opening the Same Window
Today, I open the window
before the room can become an argument.
Heat enters first, then the neighbour’s mixer,
then a motorbike, then one crow
with the confidence of a minor official.
My laptop is already awake,
blue-lit and accusing.
The inbox has multiplied overnight
like a rumour with funding.
On the table: one steel glass,
one half-finished cup of tea,
one notebook pretending it is not judging me,
one phone carrying the world’s fresh injuries
in a font designed for convenience and aesthetics.
This is my life now:
checking the news before brushing my hair,
answering emails with a body
that has become very good
at storing weather and warning
in the same shoulder.
But once, I was a girl
who thought morning meant only morning.
Once, I sharpened pencils
with a red plastic sharpener
over the dustbin
and believed the curled shavings
were proof that something useful
could come from being reduced.
Once, my schoolbag smelled
of tiffin, pencil box, raincoat plastic,
and the faint metallic panic
of unfinished homework.
I wore two tight plaits
that mother braided
and carried a water bottle
that leaked into my books
like a small private monsoon.
I thought the future
would arrive properly dressed.
I thought adulthood meant
a table of one’s own,
a clean cup,
a door that closed,
and nobody asking
why one’s face looked like that.
Now I have the table.
Now I have the cup.
The door closes badly.
The face has become evidence.
The girl I was
stands in the corner sometimes,
still in her uniform,
still holding a compass box
with one broken hinge.
She watches me read about another city
being turned into smoke
while the pressure cooker whistles
as if nothing has happened
because something is always happening
and lunch must still be made.
She asks, is this the future?
I tell her, yes, unfortunately,
but look, we still keep notebooks.
She asks, did we become brave?
I tell her, not exactly.
We became observant,
which is less heroic
but harder to confiscate.
She asks, did we learn to speak?
I tell her, sometimes.
Often late.
Often after the room has emptied.
Often with the window open,
so the sentence has somewhere to go.
Outside, the crow has returned
to inspect the railing.
Inside, the tea has darkened.
The laptop waits.
The country refreshes itself
without apology.
I pick up the cup.
Somewhere in me,
the girl with the leaking bottle
and homework panic
leans closer.
She wants to know
if we are happy.
I want to be honest,
but not cruel.
So I say:
we are still here.
I say:
we have become the kind of woman
who opens the window anyway.
I say:
we no longer mistake morning
for innocence,
but sometimes,
before the first notification,
before the heat fully enters,
before the day files its charges,
there is still a second
when the light touches the floor
like an old friend
who remembers our name.
~ Oizys.
After-note: The penultimate poem. Strange little word, penultimate. It sounds like something wearing spectacles and carrying bad news politely. A postman? One more day after this. One more window. One more attempt to make April give back at least some of what it has taken.
Tuesday, April 28, 2026
NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 28] - The Early Room // Before the News Refreshes
NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 28]
Day Twenty-Eight
Welcome back, all, for the twenty-eighth day of Na/GloPoWriMo.
Today, our featured participant is the Poet Laureate of the Primitive Planets, which brings us a (gently) hysterical love poem in response to Day 27’s even-stanza-length prompt.
Today’s resource is this short meditation by the poet Barbara Guest, on the tension between a poet’s desire to control a poem, and the fact that poetry is often most moving when it surprises both the poet and the reader with wild and unpredictible moves.
And now for today’s (optional) prompt. Victoria Chang’s poem, “The Lovers,” is short and somewhat shocking, bringing us quickly from a near-hallucinatory descriptive statement to a strange sort of question, before ending on the very direct statement of a “truth.” Six lines, three sentences, and to top it off, a title that I think works for the poem but is only obliquely related to its text. Today, try writing a poem that follows the same beats: three sentences, six lines: statement, question, conclusion.
Happy writing!
-
Note: Day Twenty-Eight asked for a six-line poem in three sentences: statement, question, conclusion. Since I had already sat down to finish yesterday’s late poem before yet another long heated day could begin and become whatever it wanted to become, I thought I should also write today’s offering while the room was still somewhat available to me. So here it is, my offering (two, actually) for Day Twenty-Eight: brief, before the day grows teeth.
The Early Room
The morning sits at the edge of the bed
like a country pretending not to listen.
How many times can a kettle boil
before the house admits it is afraid?
Some truths do not arrive loudly.
They wait in the cup and darken the tea.
~ Oizys.
-
Before the News Refreshes
The window is open and the room is already full
of things no one has named yet.
What is the use of morning
if the world keeps entering before breakfast?
Some days begin as weather.
Some days begin as warning.
~ Oizys.
-
After-note: Maybe I will write more of these depending on how the day unfolds. Or I may not. The day has not yet submitted its agenda. Also, this is the third-last poem of April, which feels both relieving and suspicious.
Day Twenty-Eight
Welcome back, all, for the twenty-eighth day of Na/GloPoWriMo.
Today, our featured participant is the Poet Laureate of the Primitive Planets, which brings us a (gently) hysterical love poem in response to Day 27’s even-stanza-length prompt.
Today’s resource is this short meditation by the poet Barbara Guest, on the tension between a poet’s desire to control a poem, and the fact that poetry is often most moving when it surprises both the poet and the reader with wild and unpredictible moves.
And now for today’s (optional) prompt. Victoria Chang’s poem, “The Lovers,” is short and somewhat shocking, bringing us quickly from a near-hallucinatory descriptive statement to a strange sort of question, before ending on the very direct statement of a “truth.” Six lines, three sentences, and to top it off, a title that I think works for the poem but is only obliquely related to its text. Today, try writing a poem that follows the same beats: three sentences, six lines: statement, question, conclusion.
Happy writing!
-
Note: Day Twenty-Eight asked for a six-line poem in three sentences: statement, question, conclusion. Since I had already sat down to finish yesterday’s late poem before yet another long heated day could begin and become whatever it wanted to become, I thought I should also write today’s offering while the room was still somewhat available to me. So here it is, my offering (two, actually) for Day Twenty-Eight: brief, before the day grows teeth.
The Early Room
The morning sits at the edge of the bed
like a country pretending not to listen.
How many times can a kettle boil
before the house admits it is afraid?
Some truths do not arrive loudly.
They wait in the cup and darken the tea.
~ Oizys.
-
Before the News Refreshes
The window is open and the room is already full
of things no one has named yet.
What is the use of morning
if the world keeps entering before breakfast?
Some days begin as weather.
Some days begin as warning.
~ Oizys.
-
After-note: Maybe I will write more of these depending on how the day unfolds. Or I may not. The day has not yet submitted its agenda. Also, this is the third-last poem of April, which feels both relieving and suspicious.
NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 27] - Instructions for Sleeping With the Windows Open
NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 27]
Day Twenty-Seven
Happy Monday, everyone. I hope you’re feeling energized about your writing as we head into the final days of this year’s April challenge.
Our featured participant today is What Rhymes With Stanza?, which brings us a quite feline response to Day 25’s ars poetica prompt.
Today’s resource is The Writers Annex Online, which offers a variety of short, online writing-related courses that include poetry workshops and explorations of specific poets’ work. Tuition rates vary from course to course, but these can be surprisingly affordable, particular given how distinguished the faculty is.
Last but not least, here’s today’s (optional) prompt. Start by reading Robert Fillman’s poem, “There should always be two.” Now, write your own poem in which all the verses contain the same number of lines (whether couplets, triplets, quatrains, etc.) and in which you give the reader instructions of some kind.
Happy writing!
-
Note: Day Twenty-Seven asked for a poem in which all verses contain the same number of lines and give the reader instructions of some kind. I am late, again, because apparently April has decided to become a small unpaid supervisor with attendance issues.
Yesterday morning began with a slow and scary political discussion with my mother while she was hurriedly cooking for my father’s lunch. Afterward, the conversation stayed lodged in my brain, the way political speech in a family often does: not as opinion, but as evidence against you. Rebellion [read: dishonour], etc. Very efficient words. By late morning, I stretched my arms above my head and caught a crick in my left shoulder-neck, which felt like the conversation had been installed there as punishment. Or it could have been gas. The body is not always a reliable narrator, but it is usually a dramatic one.
At night, after working the whole day with the cricked shoulder, I cooked pasta, ate, and slept with the windows open for the second night in a row. Around the time my family usually goes to sleep, two policemen kept circling on a motorbike with their siren. My mother and I looked out. They made their laps and left. We turned off the lights, kept the windows wide open, and the generously violent wind cooled the dark room while the pain gathered me into sleep.
So here is my late offering for Day Twenty-Seven. Hope some of you are still around or will come back.
-
Instructions for Sleeping With the Windows Open
First, do not begin the morning
with politics near the stove.
Let your mother pack the lunchbox
before the country enters the kitchen.
If she says be careful, hear:
I have survived by lowering my voice.
If you say but how long, hear:
the daughter has mistaken fear for permission.
Do not call it rebellion yet.
Families prefer softer charges.
Say mood, say phase, say too much internet,
say the girl has become difficult again.
When the conversation ends, stand up.
Raise both arms above your head.
Let the left shoulder receive
what the room could not admit.
If the neck locks, do not panic.
Pain is also a clerk.
It stamps the body: received, received,
and misfiles the original wound.
Tell yourself it may be gas.
This is important.
History must never underestimate
the digestive system’s flair for metaphor.
Go to work with the crick.
Answer emails like a citizen.
Keep your face employable.
Move the cursor across the burning map.
Somewhere, a street is being erased
with the patience of paperwork.
Somewhere, a child’s name is shortened
to fit inside a report.
Do not say the large word.
Let it steam in the rice.
Let it enter through the news alert
and leave through the pressure cooker’s hiss.
By evening, boil water.
Salt it like a small sea.
Make pasta because the body, traitor,
still wants to be fed.
Eat without ceremony.
Wash the plate if you can.
Forgive the sink its ordinary mouth.
It has swallowed worse without testimony.
Open the windows again.
This is not courage.
This is heat management, mosquito risk,
and the ancient desire to breathe.
When the siren begins, pause.
Let your mother reach the window first.
Stand beside her in the dark
like two witnesses without a court.
Watch the policemen circle the lane.
Watch the motorbike carry authority
the way a matchstick carries fire:
smallly, loudly, looking for dry grass.
Do not ask what they want.
The point is the wanting.
The point is the lap, the return,
the neighbourhood taught to lower its pulse.
After they leave, do not celebrate.
Power also exits theatrically.
It trusts the echo to remain
and do unpaid night duty.
Turn off the lights.
Leave the windows wide open.
Let the wind enter like a relative
who has forgotten how to be gentle.
If it strikes the curtain, let it.
If it cools the room, thank it.
If it sounds like something fleeing,
do not correct the comparison.
Lie down on the painful side last.
Give the shoulder time
to stop being a border post
between speech and consequence.
Think of the body as a house
with bad civic planning.
One room stores anger.
One room floods in secret.
One room keeps every sentence
you were not allowed to finish.
One room opens at night
and counts the missing aloud.
Do not sleep immediately.
That would be too clean.
Let the mind inspect its ministries.
Let each department lose the file.
Think of your mother sleeping nearby.
Think of her hands smelling of cumin,
soap, steel, worry, and the lunch
sent out like a daily treaty.
Think of your father’s lunchbox.
Think of the state’s appetite.
Think of every home trained
to serve silence hot.
Do not become noble.
Nobility is often obedience
wearing better lighting.
Stay petty enough to notice pain.
If the shoulder throbs, listen.
If the siren returns, listen.
If the wind keeps moving, listen.
The night is giving instructions too.
It says: keep the window open.
It says: do not confuse air
with freedom, but take it anyway.
It says: breathe like contraband.
It says: the room is not innocent.
It says: neither are you.
It says: morning will come
with its stove, lunchbox, and country.
Until then, sleep badly if needed.
Sleep with the pane unlatched.
Sleep while the dark keeps watch.
Sleep as if refusal needs rest.
~ Oizys.
After-note: I do not want to name the thing too neatly today. Some violences become easier to digest when language packages them like finished news. But the poem knows what it is carrying: the home as border, the body as record, the siren as reminder, the open window as a bad and necessary form of breathing. Poems do not stop what is happening. But they can refuse the clean version. They can keep the window open long enough for the smell of smoke to enter the room.
Day Twenty-Seven
Happy Monday, everyone. I hope you’re feeling energized about your writing as we head into the final days of this year’s April challenge.
Our featured participant today is What Rhymes With Stanza?, which brings us a quite feline response to Day 25’s ars poetica prompt.
Today’s resource is The Writers Annex Online, which offers a variety of short, online writing-related courses that include poetry workshops and explorations of specific poets’ work. Tuition rates vary from course to course, but these can be surprisingly affordable, particular given how distinguished the faculty is.
Last but not least, here’s today’s (optional) prompt. Start by reading Robert Fillman’s poem, “There should always be two.” Now, write your own poem in which all the verses contain the same number of lines (whether couplets, triplets, quatrains, etc.) and in which you give the reader instructions of some kind.
Happy writing!
-
Note: Day Twenty-Seven asked for a poem in which all verses contain the same number of lines and give the reader instructions of some kind. I am late, again, because apparently April has decided to become a small unpaid supervisor with attendance issues.
Yesterday morning began with a slow and scary political discussion with my mother while she was hurriedly cooking for my father’s lunch. Afterward, the conversation stayed lodged in my brain, the way political speech in a family often does: not as opinion, but as evidence against you. Rebellion [read: dishonour], etc. Very efficient words. By late morning, I stretched my arms above my head and caught a crick in my left shoulder-neck, which felt like the conversation had been installed there as punishment. Or it could have been gas. The body is not always a reliable narrator, but it is usually a dramatic one.
At night, after working the whole day with the cricked shoulder, I cooked pasta, ate, and slept with the windows open for the second night in a row. Around the time my family usually goes to sleep, two policemen kept circling on a motorbike with their siren. My mother and I looked out. They made their laps and left. We turned off the lights, kept the windows wide open, and the generously violent wind cooled the dark room while the pain gathered me into sleep.
So here is my late offering for Day Twenty-Seven. Hope some of you are still around or will come back.
-
Instructions for Sleeping With the Windows Open
First, do not begin the morning
with politics near the stove.
Let your mother pack the lunchbox
before the country enters the kitchen.
If she says be careful, hear:
I have survived by lowering my voice.
If you say but how long, hear:
the daughter has mistaken fear for permission.
Do not call it rebellion yet.
Families prefer softer charges.
Say mood, say phase, say too much internet,
say the girl has become difficult again.
When the conversation ends, stand up.
Raise both arms above your head.
Let the left shoulder receive
what the room could not admit.
If the neck locks, do not panic.
Pain is also a clerk.
It stamps the body: received, received,
and misfiles the original wound.
Tell yourself it may be gas.
This is important.
History must never underestimate
the digestive system’s flair for metaphor.
Go to work with the crick.
Answer emails like a citizen.
Keep your face employable.
Move the cursor across the burning map.
Somewhere, a street is being erased
with the patience of paperwork.
Somewhere, a child’s name is shortened
to fit inside a report.
Do not say the large word.
Let it steam in the rice.
Let it enter through the news alert
and leave through the pressure cooker’s hiss.
By evening, boil water.
Salt it like a small sea.
Make pasta because the body, traitor,
still wants to be fed.
Eat without ceremony.
Wash the plate if you can.
Forgive the sink its ordinary mouth.
It has swallowed worse without testimony.
Open the windows again.
This is not courage.
This is heat management, mosquito risk,
and the ancient desire to breathe.
When the siren begins, pause.
Let your mother reach the window first.
Stand beside her in the dark
like two witnesses without a court.
Watch the policemen circle the lane.
Watch the motorbike carry authority
the way a matchstick carries fire:
smallly, loudly, looking for dry grass.
Do not ask what they want.
The point is the wanting.
The point is the lap, the return,
the neighbourhood taught to lower its pulse.
After they leave, do not celebrate.
Power also exits theatrically.
It trusts the echo to remain
and do unpaid night duty.
Turn off the lights.
Leave the windows wide open.
Let the wind enter like a relative
who has forgotten how to be gentle.
If it strikes the curtain, let it.
If it cools the room, thank it.
If it sounds like something fleeing,
do not correct the comparison.
Lie down on the painful side last.
Give the shoulder time
to stop being a border post
between speech and consequence.
Think of the body as a house
with bad civic planning.
One room stores anger.
One room floods in secret.
One room keeps every sentence
you were not allowed to finish.
One room opens at night
and counts the missing aloud.
Do not sleep immediately.
That would be too clean.
Let the mind inspect its ministries.
Let each department lose the file.
Think of your mother sleeping nearby.
Think of her hands smelling of cumin,
soap, steel, worry, and the lunch
sent out like a daily treaty.
Think of your father’s lunchbox.
Think of the state’s appetite.
Think of every home trained
to serve silence hot.
Do not become noble.
Nobility is often obedience
wearing better lighting.
Stay petty enough to notice pain.
If the shoulder throbs, listen.
If the siren returns, listen.
If the wind keeps moving, listen.
The night is giving instructions too.
It says: keep the window open.
It says: do not confuse air
with freedom, but take it anyway.
It says: breathe like contraband.
It says: the room is not innocent.
It says: neither are you.
It says: morning will come
with its stove, lunchbox, and country.
Until then, sleep badly if needed.
Sleep with the pane unlatched.
Sleep while the dark keeps watch.
Sleep as if refusal needs rest.
~ Oizys.
After-note: I do not want to name the thing too neatly today. Some violences become easier to digest when language packages them like finished news. But the poem knows what it is carrying: the home as border, the body as record, the siren as reminder, the open window as a bad and necessary form of breathing. Poems do not stop what is happening. But they can refuse the clean version. They can keep the window open long enough for the smell of smoke to enter the room.
Sunday, April 26, 2026
NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 26] - Ars Poetica for a Room That Keeps Interrupting
NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 26]
Day Twenty-Six
Hello, everyone, and welcome back for Day Twenty-Six of National/Global Poetry Writing Month.
Today, our featured participant is Jay Siegmann, whose response to Day 25’s rather complex prompt bring us metaphors for metaphor itself.
Our resource for the day is the Commonplace podcast, which provides you with oodles of interviews with contemporary poets, as well as explorations of specific themes and books.
And now for our prompt (optional, as always). The Latin phrase ars poetica means “the art of poetry.” It’s been a tradition going all the way back to Horace for poets to write poems that lay out – whether explicitly or obliquely – some statement about why the poet writes, or what they think poetry is. Here’s a very recent example, another that I had to study in school, and a very long, witty ars poetica by Alexander Pope. Today, we challenge you to write your own ars poetica, giving the reader some insight into what keeps you writing poetry, or what you think poetry should do.
Happy writing!
-
Note: Day Twenty-Six asked for an ars poetica: a poem about poetry, why one writes, or what one thinks poetry should do. So, naturally, the prompt went straight for the poet’s existential throat: why are we here, what is language doing, and must the notebook be this dramatic about it? Very casual. Just the poet’s version of “what is the meaning of life?” before breakfast. Anyway. I do not think poetry saves the world. I distrust that kind of sentence. But I do think poetry can reduce the amount of falsehood passing through a life. It can keep a record. It can point toward material action. It can refuse deadness. So here is my offering for Day Twenty-Six.
-
Ars Poetica for a Room That Keeps Interrupting
I do not write
because language is holy.
Please.
Language has been used
to make rent agreements,
family WhatsApp messages,
performance reviews,
marriage biodatas,
eviction notices,
border maps,
police reports,
citizenship registers,
medical certificates,
school punishments,
court orders,
to level dialects until every village sounds employable,
rename rivers,
discipline accents,
flatten tongues,
lynch minorities,
degrade women,
misgender the living,
sanitize massacres,
translate occupation into security,
translate hunger into policy failure,
translate cruelty into procedure,
and write apology emails
that apologise for nothing.
I know better than to trust a sentence
just because it stands upright.
I write because the room keeps
editing me without permission.
Because the bed remembers every woman
who mistook endurance for character.
Because the window keeps pretending
it is only a window,
when all day it has been smuggling in
heat, dust, neighbours, sirens, birds,
the country’s latest cruelty, and
one thin strip of sky that refuses to explain itself.
I write because my body files complaints
in languages my mouth cannot yet afford.
The stomach burns.
The jaw locks.
The ribs rearrange
their small furniture.
The skin says:
something happened here.
And the mind, that overstaffed ministry,
opens ten departments to investigate one feeling
and still misplaces the file.
My poetry is not therapy.
Therapy has invoices.
My poetry is not revolution.
Revolution would require better logistics,
more courage, and probably a group chat
I have not been added to.
My poetry is not prayer either,
though sometimes, it kneels by accident.
Mostly,
poetry is the act
of refusing
to let the wrong thing
become normal
inside me.
A small refusal. Embarrassingly small.
A cup moved from one table to another.
A sentence cleaned until it shows where the blood was.
A joke placed carefully beside the wound
so the wound does not start thinking it is royalty.
I write because I am frightened of becoming fluent
in the language of those who taught me silence with such domestic patience.
I write because love does not prevent estrangement.
I write because the family is the first state,
and I am still learning how to defect without starving.
I write because somewhere a country is being translated into rubble,
and here, in this room, light lies down on the floor as if it has no politics.
I write because that is obscene.
I write because beauty arrives without a plan
and I do not forgive it, but I do record the visit.
I write because poems do not feed people.
This is important.
Poems do not stop bombs,
pay salaries,
reverse laws,
return friends,
open locked clinics,
protect people,
dismantle systems,
return motherlands,
or teach mothers
how to rest.
But a poem can point to the bread.
A poem can say: there, that hunger, do not decorate it.
A poem can say: send money if you can.
A poem can say: do not call this elsewhere.
A poem can say: this wound has an address.
Maybe that is all.
Maybe my poetry is not a door, not a key, not even a window.
Maybe it is only the scratch on the glass
where someone, trapped here before me,
tested the surface and left proof
that the room was not always obeyed.
I write to add one more scratch. Not escape. Not yet.
Just evidence
that I touched the pane
and found it breakable.
~ Oizys.
After-note: Since today’s poem is about what poetry can and cannot do, I wanted to leave this here: Coastal Lines Press / Zines from Gaza, a collective of writers in Gaza publishing independent booklets of poetry, essays, and testimonies. Their zines carry stories of survival, resistance, and hope, and proceeds from every zine directly fund essential supplies for families under siege. I still do not think poems stop bombs. Poems do not feed people by themselves. I distrust that romance. But poems can refuse erasure. They can (help!) travel where bodies are trapped. They can point toward bread, witness, and survival. So go! Buy a copy. Or, volunteer with your amazing creative skills!
Day Twenty-Six
Hello, everyone, and welcome back for Day Twenty-Six of National/Global Poetry Writing Month.
Today, our featured participant is Jay Siegmann, whose response to Day 25’s rather complex prompt bring us metaphors for metaphor itself.
Our resource for the day is the Commonplace podcast, which provides you with oodles of interviews with contemporary poets, as well as explorations of specific themes and books.
And now for our prompt (optional, as always). The Latin phrase ars poetica means “the art of poetry.” It’s been a tradition going all the way back to Horace for poets to write poems that lay out – whether explicitly or obliquely – some statement about why the poet writes, or what they think poetry is. Here’s a very recent example, another that I had to study in school, and a very long, witty ars poetica by Alexander Pope. Today, we challenge you to write your own ars poetica, giving the reader some insight into what keeps you writing poetry, or what you think poetry should do.
Happy writing!
-
Note: Day Twenty-Six asked for an ars poetica: a poem about poetry, why one writes, or what one thinks poetry should do. So, naturally, the prompt went straight for the poet’s existential throat: why are we here, what is language doing, and must the notebook be this dramatic about it? Very casual. Just the poet’s version of “what is the meaning of life?” before breakfast. Anyway. I do not think poetry saves the world. I distrust that kind of sentence. But I do think poetry can reduce the amount of falsehood passing through a life. It can keep a record. It can point toward material action. It can refuse deadness. So here is my offering for Day Twenty-Six.
-
Ars Poetica for a Room That Keeps Interrupting
I do not write
because language is holy.
Please.
Language has been used
to make rent agreements,
family WhatsApp messages,
performance reviews,
marriage biodatas,
eviction notices,
border maps,
police reports,
citizenship registers,
medical certificates,
school punishments,
court orders,
to level dialects until every village sounds employable,
rename rivers,
discipline accents,
flatten tongues,
lynch minorities,
degrade women,
misgender the living,
sanitize massacres,
translate occupation into security,
translate hunger into policy failure,
translate cruelty into procedure,
and write apology emails
that apologise for nothing.
I know better than to trust a sentence
just because it stands upright.
I write because the room keeps
editing me without permission.
Because the bed remembers every woman
who mistook endurance for character.
Because the window keeps pretending
it is only a window,
when all day it has been smuggling in
heat, dust, neighbours, sirens, birds,
the country’s latest cruelty, and
one thin strip of sky that refuses to explain itself.
I write because my body files complaints
in languages my mouth cannot yet afford.
The stomach burns.
The jaw locks.
The ribs rearrange
their small furniture.
The skin says:
something happened here.
And the mind, that overstaffed ministry,
opens ten departments to investigate one feeling
and still misplaces the file.
My poetry is not therapy.
Therapy has invoices.
My poetry is not revolution.
Revolution would require better logistics,
more courage, and probably a group chat
I have not been added to.
My poetry is not prayer either,
though sometimes, it kneels by accident.
Mostly,
poetry is the act
of refusing
to let the wrong thing
become normal
inside me.
A small refusal. Embarrassingly small.
A cup moved from one table to another.
A sentence cleaned until it shows where the blood was.
A joke placed carefully beside the wound
so the wound does not start thinking it is royalty.
I write because I am frightened of becoming fluent
in the language of those who taught me silence with such domestic patience.
I write because love does not prevent estrangement.
I write because the family is the first state,
and I am still learning how to defect without starving.
I write because somewhere a country is being translated into rubble,
and here, in this room, light lies down on the floor as if it has no politics.
I write because that is obscene.
I write because beauty arrives without a plan
and I do not forgive it, but I do record the visit.
I write because poems do not feed people.
This is important.
Poems do not stop bombs,
pay salaries,
reverse laws,
return friends,
open locked clinics,
protect people,
dismantle systems,
return motherlands,
or teach mothers
how to rest.
But a poem can point to the bread.
A poem can say: there, that hunger, do not decorate it.
A poem can say: send money if you can.
A poem can say: do not call this elsewhere.
A poem can say: this wound has an address.
Maybe that is all.
Maybe my poetry is not a door, not a key, not even a window.
Maybe it is only the scratch on the glass
where someone, trapped here before me,
tested the surface and left proof
that the room was not always obeyed.
I write to add one more scratch. Not escape. Not yet.
Just evidence
that I touched the pane
and found it breakable.
~ Oizys.
After-note: Since today’s poem is about what poetry can and cannot do, I wanted to leave this here: Coastal Lines Press / Zines from Gaza, a collective of writers in Gaza publishing independent booklets of poetry, essays, and testimonies. Their zines carry stories of survival, resistance, and hope, and proceeds from every zine directly fund essential supplies for families under siege. I still do not think poems stop bombs. Poems do not feed people by themselves. I distrust that romance. But poems can refuse erasure. They can (help!) travel where bodies are trapped. They can point toward bread, witness, and survival. So go! Buy a copy. Or, volunteer with your amazing creative skills!
Saturday, April 25, 2026
NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 25] - The Window Keeps Its Own Counsel
NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 25]
Day Twenty-Five
Hello, all! Happy Saturday, and happy 25th day of Na/GloPoWriMo!
Our featured daily participant is Behind Door Number 3, where the response to Day 24’s “strange things at night” prompt involve socks going on walk-about.
Today’s resource is Boston University’s video archive of lectures and conversations stemming from former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinksy‘s course on The Art of Poetry.
And now for our (optional) daily prompt! In her poem, “The Apple Tree in Blossom,” Melissa Kwasny strings together several fantastical metaphors for the apple tree, before shifting into exclamations, definitions, and a series of nimble, tonal shifts – and seeming changes in topic – before circling around back to the apple tree. Today’s challenge asks you to write your own poem in which you use at least three metaphors for a single thing, include an exclamation, ruminate on the definition of a word, and come back in the closing line to the image or idea with which you opened the poem.
Happy writing!
-
Note: Day Twenty-Five asked for three metaphors for a single thing, an exclamation, a rumination on definition, and a return to the opening image. So, naturally, I chose the window, because apparently I cannot leave rooms alone. So, here is my offering for Day Twenty-Five.
-
The Window Keeps Its Own Counsel
The window is a thin aquarium
where weather swims past
pretending not to look in.
It is also a border
that learned transparency
as a public relations strategy.
It is the house’s most polite eye,
open all day,
reporting nothing.
Outside, April goes on
with its usual administrative cruelty:
heat entering early,
birds filing complaints in the wires,
a neighbour’s pressure cooker
hissing like an old accusation.
Inside, my mother folds a towel
with the patience of someone
who has been taught
that order is a kind of prayer
even when god is not listening.
The window brightens.
Traitor!
I say this softly, of course.
Even my outrage has indoor manners.
What is a window, anyway?
The dictionary says:
an opening in a wall
for the admission of light and air.
Admission.
As if light has filled out a form.
As if air has stood in line
with two passport photos
and proof of address.
As if anything that enters a room
does so legally.
There is another meaning too:
a period of opportunity.
Small laugh.
A window, then,
is either a hole in the wall
or a scheduled chance
to escape through one.
Both seem optimistic.
At work, they say
we should circle back
when there is bandwidth.
At home, the ceiling fan
circles back all afternoon
and still arrives nowhere.
My unread emails breed quietly.
My salary sits in the corner
like a relative everyone knows
has failed me
but no one wants to insult aloud.
Somewhere, a country
is being translated into rubble.
Somewhere, a mother
is counting children
with a mouth that has forgotten
how numbers end.
Here, the window takes in light.
Here, the light lies down
on the floor
like nothing has happened.
I want to be fair to the window.
It did not invent distance.
It did not invent the room.
It did not invent the human habit
of seeing suffering
and calling it elsewhere.
Still.
All day it holds the world
just far enough away
to be bearable.
A tree leans into its frame,
green and shameless.
A crow lands on the railing
with the confidence of a bad omen
who has tenure.
The sky, that old absentee landlord,
collects its blue rent
from everyone.
For a moment,
I almost forgive beauty
for arriving without a plan.
Then the window shows me my face
laid over the street,
my eyes floating above the traffic,
my mouth superimposed
on a woman carrying vegetables home,
my forehead ghosted
over a scooter, a dog, a torn poster,
the ordinary republic
of things continuing.
Reflection:
from reflectere,
to bend back.
Of course.
Even looking out
is another way
of being returned to myself.
By evening, the glass darkens.
The aquarium becomes a mirror.
The border becomes a bruise.
The polite eye closes halfway
and keeps what it has seen.
My mother asks me
to shut it before the mosquitoes come in.
I do.
The room grows smaller,
as rooms do
when they are pleased with themselves.
Outside, the tree keeps moving
after I have stopped watching.
Inside, the curtain settles
with the tired dignity
of a woman who has worked all day
and is still expected
to soften the light.
And there it is again—
the window,
thin aquarium,
transparent border,
house-eye,
holding back the whole weather
with one pane of glass.
~ Oizys.
After-note: A small resource from my side: Since today’s poem keeps returning to looking, frames, and the fragile business of witnessing, I came across this today and wanted to leave it here with the poem: another aperture, another angle of light. So, for anyone who may want to support Gaza creatives. The initiative is accepting photography, original artwork, and short-form writing, and making prints from the contributions with profits going toward Gaza. Please read, share, or contribute if you are able. Gaza's Creative Allies.
Day Twenty-Five
Hello, all! Happy Saturday, and happy 25th day of Na/GloPoWriMo!
Our featured daily participant is Behind Door Number 3, where the response to Day 24’s “strange things at night” prompt involve socks going on walk-about.
Today’s resource is Boston University’s video archive of lectures and conversations stemming from former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinksy‘s course on The Art of Poetry.
And now for our (optional) daily prompt! In her poem, “The Apple Tree in Blossom,” Melissa Kwasny strings together several fantastical metaphors for the apple tree, before shifting into exclamations, definitions, and a series of nimble, tonal shifts – and seeming changes in topic – before circling around back to the apple tree. Today’s challenge asks you to write your own poem in which you use at least three metaphors for a single thing, include an exclamation, ruminate on the definition of a word, and come back in the closing line to the image or idea with which you opened the poem.
Happy writing!
-
Note: Day Twenty-Five asked for three metaphors for a single thing, an exclamation, a rumination on definition, and a return to the opening image. So, naturally, I chose the window, because apparently I cannot leave rooms alone. So, here is my offering for Day Twenty-Five.
-
The Window Keeps Its Own Counsel
The window is a thin aquarium
where weather swims past
pretending not to look in.
It is also a border
that learned transparency
as a public relations strategy.
It is the house’s most polite eye,
open all day,
reporting nothing.
Outside, April goes on
with its usual administrative cruelty:
heat entering early,
birds filing complaints in the wires,
a neighbour’s pressure cooker
hissing like an old accusation.
Inside, my mother folds a towel
with the patience of someone
who has been taught
that order is a kind of prayer
even when god is not listening.
The window brightens.
Traitor!
I say this softly, of course.
Even my outrage has indoor manners.
What is a window, anyway?
The dictionary says:
an opening in a wall
for the admission of light and air.
Admission.
As if light has filled out a form.
As if air has stood in line
with two passport photos
and proof of address.
As if anything that enters a room
does so legally.
There is another meaning too:
a period of opportunity.
Small laugh.
A window, then,
is either a hole in the wall
or a scheduled chance
to escape through one.
Both seem optimistic.
At work, they say
we should circle back
when there is bandwidth.
At home, the ceiling fan
circles back all afternoon
and still arrives nowhere.
My unread emails breed quietly.
My salary sits in the corner
like a relative everyone knows
has failed me
but no one wants to insult aloud.
Somewhere, a country
is being translated into rubble.
Somewhere, a mother
is counting children
with a mouth that has forgotten
how numbers end.
Here, the window takes in light.
Here, the light lies down
on the floor
like nothing has happened.
I want to be fair to the window.
It did not invent distance.
It did not invent the room.
It did not invent the human habit
of seeing suffering
and calling it elsewhere.
Still.
All day it holds the world
just far enough away
to be bearable.
A tree leans into its frame,
green and shameless.
A crow lands on the railing
with the confidence of a bad omen
who has tenure.
The sky, that old absentee landlord,
collects its blue rent
from everyone.
For a moment,
I almost forgive beauty
for arriving without a plan.
Then the window shows me my face
laid over the street,
my eyes floating above the traffic,
my mouth superimposed
on a woman carrying vegetables home,
my forehead ghosted
over a scooter, a dog, a torn poster,
the ordinary republic
of things continuing.
Reflection:
from reflectere,
to bend back.
Of course.
Even looking out
is another way
of being returned to myself.
By evening, the glass darkens.
The aquarium becomes a mirror.
The border becomes a bruise.
The polite eye closes halfway
and keeps what it has seen.
My mother asks me
to shut it before the mosquitoes come in.
I do.
The room grows smaller,
as rooms do
when they are pleased with themselves.
Outside, the tree keeps moving
after I have stopped watching.
Inside, the curtain settles
with the tired dignity
of a woman who has worked all day
and is still expected
to soften the light.
And there it is again—
the window,
thin aquarium,
transparent border,
house-eye,
holding back the whole weather
with one pane of glass.
~ Oizys.
After-note: A small resource from my side: Since today’s poem keeps returning to looking, frames, and the fragile business of witnessing, I came across this today and wanted to leave it here with the poem: another aperture, another angle of light. So, for anyone who may want to support Gaza creatives. The initiative is accepting photography, original artwork, and short-form writing, and making prints from the contributions with profits going toward Gaza. Please read, share, or contribute if you are able. Gaza's Creative Allies.
Friday, April 24, 2026
NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 24] - Night Shift
NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 24]
Day Twenty-Four
We’ve made it to the final Friday of National/Global Poetry Writing Month 2026, everyone!
Today’s featured participant is Poem Dive, where you’ll find a rather heavy response to Day 23’s villanelle prompt, but one that showcases a particular quality of the form — in deft hands, the repeated lines can have a sort of dolorous, bell-like quality, as the poem were tolling its refrains.
Our resource today is this curated selection of letters written by the English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, in which he explains aspects of his thinking about poetry.
Finally, here is our (optional) prompt for the day! In her poem, “The Flying Nightdress,” Mandakranta Sen describes something fantastical and strange that occurs while the rest of the world is asleep. The imagery of the poem is dreamlike, but the situation it describes is otherwise presented quite straightforwardly. Today, we challenge you to write your own poem that takes place at night, and describes something magical or strange that happens but that no one is awake (or around) to notice.
Happy writing!
-
Night Shift
At night, when no one was awake to accuse the world of anything.
A spoon bends toward the moon.
A towel remembers the body.
A closed laptop keeps typing my unsent thoughts.
The office chairs rearrange themselves according to who suffered most that day.
My unread emails grow teeth.
The cursor blinks like a small, unpaid ghost.
Somewhere, a map quietly changes its mind.
A yellow line eats its way inland.
A border rinses its hands in the dark.
After midnight, the room began returning everything I had swallowed.
While I sleep, my body holds a meeting without me.
While I sleep, my stomach lights a small fire and reads old insults aloud.
My ribs shift furniture.
My skin sheds one invisible version of me.
On the balcony, the plants whisper in my mother tongue.
A cup of water grows a tiny moon.
My blanket rises like a hill and shelters all the tired women you have been.
No one sees any of this.
By morning, even the magic has folded itself away.
My mother slowly wakes up and turns the night into yet another morning of labour.
~ Oizys.
-
Note: As Israel occupies Lebanon with its “yellow line,” I wanted the poem to carry, without naming too much, the way a border is used to carve a wound in the dark. Slow Factory Super Fund for Lebanon: An urgent fundraiser supporting families in Lebanon affected by ongoing bombardment and displacement, with donations distributed directly for immediate shelter and food needs. Good night.
Day Twenty-Four
We’ve made it to the final Friday of National/Global Poetry Writing Month 2026, everyone!
Today’s featured participant is Poem Dive, where you’ll find a rather heavy response to Day 23’s villanelle prompt, but one that showcases a particular quality of the form — in deft hands, the repeated lines can have a sort of dolorous, bell-like quality, as the poem were tolling its refrains.
Our resource today is this curated selection of letters written by the English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, in which he explains aspects of his thinking about poetry.
Finally, here is our (optional) prompt for the day! In her poem, “The Flying Nightdress,” Mandakranta Sen describes something fantastical and strange that occurs while the rest of the world is asleep. The imagery of the poem is dreamlike, but the situation it describes is otherwise presented quite straightforwardly. Today, we challenge you to write your own poem that takes place at night, and describes something magical or strange that happens but that no one is awake (or around) to notice.
Happy writing!
-
Night Shift
At night, when no one was awake to accuse the world of anything.
A spoon bends toward the moon.
A towel remembers the body.
A closed laptop keeps typing my unsent thoughts.
The office chairs rearrange themselves according to who suffered most that day.
My unread emails grow teeth.
The cursor blinks like a small, unpaid ghost.
Somewhere, a map quietly changes its mind.
A yellow line eats its way inland.
A border rinses its hands in the dark.
After midnight, the room began returning everything I had swallowed.
While I sleep, my body holds a meeting without me.
While I sleep, my stomach lights a small fire and reads old insults aloud.
My ribs shift furniture.
My skin sheds one invisible version of me.
On the balcony, the plants whisper in my mother tongue.
A cup of water grows a tiny moon.
My blanket rises like a hill and shelters all the tired women you have been.
No one sees any of this.
By morning, even the magic has folded itself away.
My mother slowly wakes up and turns the night into yet another morning of labour.
~ Oizys.
-
Note: As Israel occupies Lebanon with its “yellow line,” I wanted the poem to carry, without naming too much, the way a border is used to carve a wound in the dark. Slow Factory Super Fund for Lebanon: An urgent fundraiser supporting families in Lebanon affected by ongoing bombardment and displacement, with donations distributed directly for immediate shelter and food needs. Good night.
NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 23] - Thursday Practices
NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 23]
Day Twenty-Three
What’s so good about Thursday, anyway? Well, when it’s in April, it furnishes an excellent excuse to write another poem for Na/GloPoWriMo!
Our featured participant today is Lorraine Ryan, in whose response to Day 22’s “serious fun” prompt we hear both the counsel of “monkey mind” and what I suppose must be its North American cousin, “squirrel mind” (though squirrels, diligently planning for winter, also embody the protestant work ethic that the poem mentions).
Today’s resource is the Versecraft podcast. If you’re interested in poetic form, this is the podcast for you!
And speaking of forms, today’s (optional) prompt takes its inspiration from Kiki Petrosino’s loose villanelle, “Nursery.” Try your hand today at your own take on a villanelle, and have the poem end on a question.
Happy writing!
-
Pre-poem note: I am one day late for this submission, but I am doing it anyway. I wrote the villanelle last night after struggling a lot under my blanket on my phone, but I gave up and could not post it. I refined it today, and here is my offering.
-
Thursday Practices
I keep returning to the same small thought,
like a cup set down, then lifted, then misplaced.
What is it I was trying to remember?
Morning hums with all the things I’ve not done yet,
the clock polite but firm about its pace.
I keep returning to the same small thought.
A squirrel startles, all intention and forget,
a sermon in a body built for haste.
What is it I was trying to remember?
Somewhere a list insists that I am not
the kind of person time will ever waste.
I keep returning to the same small thought,
though monkey-mind would rather knot and unknot
each second till it frays without a trace.
What is it I was trying to remember?
By evening, even questions feel half-taught,
their edges worn, their urgency displaced.
I keep returning to the same small thought:
what is it I was trying to remember?
-
After-poem rambling: I am submitting my Day 23 response on the 24th because I tried, and I was so tired. So many things happened at once. Work was exhausting. For the past couple of days, I have had to work with a person I believe is softly manipulating me by being extra nice, extra careful, and politely over-inquisitive in order to dominate me. She keeps questioning me, and I feel as if she is trying to steal my ideas and then repitch them to me in the next breath. But I do not know how to prove it, and I am stuck. This brought back memories of a “best friend” I had who, for the longest time, did the same thing. I never understood or registered it, and I allowed it to happen. It lodged humiliation in my body, something I learned to carry, and long years later, it has reproduced itself in different parts of me. Her words still spin around my head, and something in me gets triggered when I listen to this elderly co-worker of mine. Anyway, yesterday, I got into trouble for a mistake I made in my part-time volunteer work too. It was an error, and no harm was intended, but anyway: a mistake is a mistake. It aggravated my brain to a point of no return. I apologized to the person affected and to my volunteer employer, who told me it was not a problem and that they had spoken to the person affected. Still, it was perpetually triggering to me. Today, the person affected told me it was absolutely okay and that all was forgiven, with a smiley face and a heart. It somehow calmed me. But I had to talk to the co-worker again today for a meeting, and I found a way to cut it short. Yet she extended it. I am not supposed to spend so much time working with her anyway, because this is not priority work, and there are other priority tasks in which she is not involved. But she insists because “later it will be last-minute.” Ummm... what about the last-minute priority projects that are on me right now? Why put the burden on me to save this project from becoming last-minute later, while I am painfully trying to survive the already last-minute priority work on me right now? I want to uproot my hair, scratch my skin off, and disappear from the face of the earth. Today, after work, I had a capitalistic pang of wanting to leave my job because I constantly feel I have had zero growth here for the past year. I have three years of experience in total, but only a meagre salary. All of this grotesqueness while that co-worker haunts me with my eyes open, while the memory of my abusive best friend haunts me with a similar voice, while my mistake haunts me even though it is resolved. My guts are burning. Apologies to anyone who made it this far through the rambling.
~ Oizys.
Wednesday, April 22, 2026
NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 22] - Internal Affairs
NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 22]
Day Twenty-Two
Happy Wednesday, everybody, and welcome back for Day 22 of Na/GloPoWriMo.
Our featured participant for the day is 7eyedwonder, where the response to Day 21’s names-and-nicknames prompt brings us a lovely riff on the on the Shakespearean phrase, “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”
Today’s resource is The Kelly Writers House’s system of online book groups. At any given time, the Philadelpia-based center has a number of different book/discussion groups going on, and all you need to participate is an email address and a willingness to engage in a discussion of a specific group’s chosen book or set of poems.
And now for our (optional) prompt! Jaswinder Bolina’s poem “Mood Ring” imagines the speaker as both himself and an interior being (who happens to take the form of a small donkey). It’s quite silly . . . and not silly at the same time. A sort of “serious fun.” Today, we’d like to challenge you to write your own poem in which the speaker is in dialogue with him or herself.
Happy writing!
-
Internal Affairs
There are two of us in here.
This is already a problem.
—
“I think we should begin calmly,” I say,
like someone who has never once
been calm.
She laughs.
Not kindly.
—
You always do this, she says.
You make a structure
and then you live inside it
like it’s not a cage.
It’s not a cage, I say.
It’s a form.
Oh, she says.
Does it open?
—
We sit with that.
Or rather, I sit.
She paces.
She has always been better
with movement.
—
What do you want, I ask her.
She says: not this.
Which is not helpful.
Which is extremely accurate.
—
You wanted to be good, she reminds me.
You wanted to be chosen.
You wanted:
I know what I wanted, I snap,
too quickly.
She raises an eyebrow I cannot see
but feel.
—
There are things you say in poems,
she continues,
that you do not permit in life.
That’s called craft, I say.
That’s called fear, she says.
—
We take a break from each other
by not speaking.
It does not work.
—
At some point, I try to reason with her.
If we fall apart, I say,
who exactly is supposed to write about it?
She considers this.
Then, annoyingly, smiles.
Oh, she says.
I’m not interested in writing about it.
I’m interested in it happening.
—
This is where she becomes dangerous.
This is where I become careful.
—
You think survival is a virtue, she says.
It is, I say.
It’s also a habit, she says.
And not all habits are holy.
—
I do not have a response prepared for that.
This irritates me.
—
Fine, I say. What do you suggest?
She leans in,
closer than I like.
Something small, she says.
Something irreversible.
—
Like what?
She shrugs.
Say the wrong thing.
Refuse something easy.
Stop being impressive.
—
I laugh.
Genuinely.
You’re asking for chaos, I say.
No, she says.
I’m asking for honesty
without rehearsal.
—
We are quiet again.
Which is worse than the arguing.
—
In the end, we compromise.
Which is to say,
I write this down.
And she lets me.
For now.
—
But as I finish, she says;
softly, almost politely:
This is still you controlling the narrative.
—
I don’t answer.
I don’t know if I can.
—
Tomorrow, she says,
we try it my way.
~ Oizys.
Day Twenty-Two
Happy Wednesday, everybody, and welcome back for Day 22 of Na/GloPoWriMo.
Our featured participant for the day is 7eyedwonder, where the response to Day 21’s names-and-nicknames prompt brings us a lovely riff on the on the Shakespearean phrase, “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”
Today’s resource is The Kelly Writers House’s system of online book groups. At any given time, the Philadelpia-based center has a number of different book/discussion groups going on, and all you need to participate is an email address and a willingness to engage in a discussion of a specific group’s chosen book or set of poems.
And now for our (optional) prompt! Jaswinder Bolina’s poem “Mood Ring” imagines the speaker as both himself and an interior being (who happens to take the form of a small donkey). It’s quite silly . . . and not silly at the same time. A sort of “serious fun.” Today, we’d like to challenge you to write your own poem in which the speaker is in dialogue with him or herself.
Happy writing!
-
Internal Affairs
There are two of us in here.
This is already a problem.
—
“I think we should begin calmly,” I say,
like someone who has never once
been calm.
She laughs.
Not kindly.
—
You always do this, she says.
You make a structure
and then you live inside it
like it’s not a cage.
It’s not a cage, I say.
It’s a form.
Oh, she says.
Does it open?
—
We sit with that.
Or rather, I sit.
She paces.
She has always been better
with movement.
—
What do you want, I ask her.
She says: not this.
Which is not helpful.
Which is extremely accurate.
—
You wanted to be good, she reminds me.
You wanted to be chosen.
You wanted:
I know what I wanted, I snap,
too quickly.
She raises an eyebrow I cannot see
but feel.
—
There are things you say in poems,
she continues,
that you do not permit in life.
That’s called craft, I say.
That’s called fear, she says.
—
We take a break from each other
by not speaking.
It does not work.
—
At some point, I try to reason with her.
If we fall apart, I say,
who exactly is supposed to write about it?
She considers this.
Then, annoyingly, smiles.
Oh, she says.
I’m not interested in writing about it.
I’m interested in it happening.
—
This is where she becomes dangerous.
This is where I become careful.
—
You think survival is a virtue, she says.
It is, I say.
It’s also a habit, she says.
And not all habits are holy.
—
I do not have a response prepared for that.
This irritates me.
—
Fine, I say. What do you suggest?
She leans in,
closer than I like.
Something small, she says.
Something irreversible.
—
Like what?
She shrugs.
Say the wrong thing.
Refuse something easy.
Stop being impressive.
—
I laugh.
Genuinely.
You’re asking for chaos, I say.
No, she says.
I’m asking for honesty
without rehearsal.
—
We are quiet again.
Which is worse than the arguing.
—
In the end, we compromise.
Which is to say,
I write this down.
And she lets me.
For now.
—
But as I finish, she says;
softly, almost politely:
This is still you controlling the narrative.
—
I don’t answer.
I don’t know if I can.
—
Tomorrow, she says,
we try it my way.
~ Oizys.
Tuesday, April 21, 2026
NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 21] - Names for a Thing That Refuses to Stay Named
NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 21]
Day Twenty-One
Wow! Three weeks down, and just a week and some change left to go in this year’s National/Global Poetry Writing Month.
Today’s daily featured participant is Haphazard’s Na/GloPoWriMo, where the response to Day Twenty’s mythic prompt involves a small brown owl. (And here I thought “morpork” was just a part of a silly name the late Sir Terry Pratchett made up for an imaginary city . . . though now I suppose the owl in the coat-of-arms ought to have been a clue).
Our resource for the day is this short essay by the poet Kimiko Hahn on senryu, the haiku’s comic cousin.
And here’s today’s prompt (optional, as always). In her poem, “Names and Nicknames,” Monika Kumar reminisces over various nicknames she has been given, the actual name her mother gave her, and the way both names and nicknames indicate a claim and an intimacy at once. In your poem for today, we challenge you to write your own poem in which you muse on your name and nicknames you’ve been given or, if you like, the name and nicknames for an animal, plant, or place. For example, I’ve always been amused at the fact that red trillium (a rather pretty wildflower that grows in the woods near my house) has several other common names, including the bizarre “stinking benjamin.” The plant grows very short and close to the ground, so I’ve never actually leaned over far enough to get a whiff and see how merited that sobriquet is!
Happy writing!
-
Note: Day Twenty-One asked for names and nicknames, which is a dangerous prompt if you have spent any time thinking about who gets to name, and who is expected to answer. So, here's my offering for Day Twenty-One.
-
Names for a Thing That Refuses to Stay Named
They named me first
for something that would sit still
long enough to be loved.
A small, correct name.
Mouth-sized.
Easy to call across a room
without raising suspicion.
(nothing moves if it is named properly)
Later, the nicknames came:
soft things, mostly,
stitched from habit
and the convenience of ownership.
Little one.
Good girl.
Don’t make a scene.
(inventory prefers smaller labels)
Little one.
Good girl.
Be easier to keep.
(easier to sort, easier to keep)
Each one a narrowing.
Each one a hand
resting just a moment too long
at the back of the neck.
—there are ways of guiding
that do not look like force.
There were other names, too—
the ones not spoken directly,
only implied in the way
a sentence bent around me.
Difficult.
Too much.
Unbecoming.
(unbecoming what?)
(unbecoming to whom?)
Strange how a name can follow you
even when no one is calling.
Stranger still
how it learns to answer for you.
—how it enters the mouth before you do.
—how it closes behind you like a gate.
I tried on others in secret.
Names that did not kneel.
Names that did not soften
at the edges when held.
Names that did not ask permission
to exist in a room.
(rooms have borders)
(borders have names)
Some of them broke in my mouth.
Some of them refused me.
Some of them stayed.
—I kept the ones that did not translate easily.
—I kept the ones that made the air resist me.
I am not sure which one is mine now.
The first one still lingers—
polite, patient,
waiting to be used again
like a key left under the mat.
(entry is always easier than exit)
But there are others now,
less obedient.
Names with teeth.
Names that do not come
when called.
(they will call anyway)
(they will keep calling)
If I answer at all,
it is slower than before.
As if I am deciding—
even now—
whether the voice
belongs to me.
—or to the record.
—or to the list.
—or to the land that keeps forgetting
what it was called before.
~ Oizys.
Monday, April 20, 2026
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.
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.
Friday, April 17, 2026
NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 17] - After the door, the map, the mirror
NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 17]
Day Seventeen
Happy Friday, all! I hope you find that writing poetry is a great entry-way into your weekend.
Today, our featured participant is Adam J Scarborough, who brings us a wonderfully disorienting haiku in response to Day 16’s prompt.
Our resource for the day is The Walt Whitman Archive, where you’ll find all manner of material related to Walt Whitman, one of America’s most celebrated and — let’s be frank — unusual poets.
And now for our (optional) prompt! Sergio Raimondi’s poem, “Today Matsuo Basho Cooks,” plays on the following haiku by (you guessed it), Matsuo Basho:
Happy writing!
-
Note: For Day Seventeen, my offering is a response-poem braided from Dickinson, Rich, and Plath, with yesterday’s half-room still refusing to leave me alone.
After the door, the map, the mirror
After Emily Dickinson Leaves the Door Ajar
Because I could not be vast,
the room kept half of me.
Not death.
Not exactly.
Only its smaller clerks:
domestic decree,
the polite partition,
the inherited hush
buttoned up the throat.
Emily,
you made a corridor
out of a dash.
I live there now—
between said and unsaid,
between mine and permitted,
between the bed’s thin grammar
and the wall’s good manners.
A woman learns quickly
what must not clang.
even grief, here,
must enter sideways.
The window does not open.
It concedes.
The door is not locked.
It has simply been trained
to hesitate.
And I,
so long instructed
in the etiquette of less,
have become excellent
at folding.
the body into corner,
the sentence into smoke,
the wanting into something
that passes for discipline.
After Adrienne Rich, Dividing the Room
The room was split before I entered it.
Someone had already done the thinking.
One half for use.
One half for permission.
Enough remainder to hold a girl
until she mistakes arrangement
for character.
Adrienne,
I was taught to call this ordinary.
To say
the wall is just a wall,
the smaller portion merely practical,
the narrowing of self
a household skill.
But language leaves fingerprints.
What is allocated
is never innocent.
What is shared
is not always mutual.
What is kept “for now”
has a way of becoming
the architecture of a life.
So yes, Adrienne,
I have read the maps.
I know borders arrive first
in furniture,
in lowered voices,
in who gets the window,
in who learns to live
as though leftover space
were a kind of love.
The room says nothing.
Power rarely has to.
After Sylvia Plath, Entering The Room
You wrote of certain slants.
I know them too.
The room enters the body.
Not as flame.
Not as spectacle.
More intimate than that.
A slow white pressure.
A neatness with teeth.
The mirror holding my face
like an accusation
filed and refiled
under daughter,
under woman,
under manageable.
The curtains do not flutter.
They supervise.
The cupboard swells
with its patient jaw.
Even the pillow knows
how to keep a secret
pressed flat.
Sylvia,
here nothing dramatic happens.
That is the drama.
Day Seventeen
Happy Friday, all! I hope you find that writing poetry is a great entry-way into your weekend.
Today, our featured participant is Adam J Scarborough, who brings us a wonderfully disorienting haiku in response to Day 16’s prompt.
Our resource for the day is The Walt Whitman Archive, where you’ll find all manner of material related to Walt Whitman, one of America’s most celebrated and — let’s be frank — unusual poets.
And now for our (optional) prompt! Sergio Raimondi’s poem, “Today Matsuo Basho Cooks,” plays on the following haiku by (you guessed it), Matsuo Basho:
Crimson pepper pod!For today’s challenge, write a poem in which you respond to a favorite poem by another poet.
Add two pairs of wings, and look—
darting dragonfly.
Happy writing!
-
Note: For Day Seventeen, my offering is a response-poem braided from Dickinson, Rich, and Plath, with yesterday’s half-room still refusing to leave me alone.
After the door, the map, the mirror
After Emily Dickinson Leaves the Door Ajar
Because I could not be vast,
the room kept half of me.
Not death.
Not exactly.
Only its smaller clerks:
domestic decree,
the polite partition,
the inherited hush
buttoned up the throat.
Emily,
you made a corridor
out of a dash.
I live there now—
between said and unsaid,
between mine and permitted,
between the bed’s thin grammar
and the wall’s good manners.
A woman learns quickly
what must not clang.
even grief, here,
must enter sideways.
The window does not open.
It concedes.
The door is not locked.
It has simply been trained
to hesitate.
And I,
so long instructed
in the etiquette of less,
have become excellent
at folding.
the body into corner,
the sentence into smoke,
the wanting into something
that passes for discipline.
After Adrienne Rich, Dividing the Room
The room was split before I entered it.
Someone had already done the thinking.
One half for use.
One half for permission.
Enough remainder to hold a girl
until she mistakes arrangement
for character.
Adrienne,
I was taught to call this ordinary.
To say
the wall is just a wall,
the smaller portion merely practical,
the narrowing of self
a household skill.
But language leaves fingerprints.
What is allocated
is never innocent.
What is shared
is not always mutual.
What is kept “for now”
has a way of becoming
the architecture of a life.
So yes, Adrienne,
I have read the maps.
I know borders arrive first
in furniture,
in lowered voices,
in who gets the window,
in who learns to live
as though leftover space
were a kind of love.
The room says nothing.
Power rarely has to.
After Sylvia Plath, Entering The Room
You wrote of certain slants.
I know them too.
The room enters the body.
Not as flame.
Not as spectacle.
More intimate than that.
A slow white pressure.
A neatness with teeth.
The mirror holding my face
like an accusation
filed and refiled
under daughter,
under woman,
under manageable.
The curtains do not flutter.
They supervise.
The cupboard swells
with its patient jaw.
Even the pillow knows
how to keep a secret
pressed flat.
Sylvia,
here nothing dramatic happens.
That is the drama.
 |
| Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (entry dated April 17, 1956) |
April again.
Morning again.
Morning comes anyway.
I gather my limbs
as though from poorer ground.
The body rises here
less like waking
than being recalled
to an arrangement
it did not survive.
The old labour of rising
as if from a grave
into a room
already waiting
to resume its claims.
Morning, and again
the small exhumation of self.
Limb by limb,
I assemble obedience
from the graveyard shift
of sleep.
Morning again.
Morning comes anyway.
I gather my limbs
as though from poorer ground.
The body rises here
less like waking
than being recalled
to an arrangement
it did not survive.
The old labour of rising
as if from a grave
into a room
already waiting
to resume its claims.
Morning, and again
the small exhumation of self.
Limb by limb,
I assemble obedience
from the graveyard shift
of sleep.
A life can be halved
without blood.
A mind can be trained
to sit in its designated portion
and call that poise.
By afternoon,
light enters
like a verdict.
silence is laid out
white as a sickbed.
the soul—if that is still
the word for it—
bruises quietly
against its assigned perimeter.
No carriage waits.
No clean rebellion either.
Only the old arrangement:
one portion for breathing,
one for obedience,
and a narrow seam between
through which the mind
keeps trying
to escape unfollowed.
~ Oizys.
Afternote: I came across an article about Toni Morrison today, who once said, rather sharply, with a kind of necessary impatience, “Don’t do that. Don’t write about your little life.” I have been thinking about that sentence all day. This poem begins in the half-room, but I hope it does not stay there as mere confession or anecdotal. Rooms are never only rooms. They are blueprints of hierarchy, rehearsals of obedience, small domestic states where power learns to appear natural. So I hoped this poem could extrapolate from the room-cage outward: toward lands partitioned, peoples pushed onto the smaller side of history, and the brutal interruption of continuity, memory, and inheritance that follows when a place is carved up by force.
Thursday, April 16, 2026
NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 16] - What the half-room refused to say
NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 16]
Day Sixteen
Happy sixteenth day of National/Global Poetry Writing month, everyone!
Our featured daily participant is klara laurenzia linden, who brings us a bilingual response to Day Fifteen’s unusual-love-poem challenge.
Today’s resource is Copper Canyon Press’s “Line/Break” interview series, which brings you half-hour-ish episodes featuring eight contemporary poets.
And last but not least, here’s today’s optional prompt. In “Ocean,” Robinson Jeffers delivers an almost oracular, scriptural description of the sea not just as a geographical phenomenon, but a sort of being – old, wise, profound, and able to teach those who want to learn. Today, try writing a poem in which you describe something that cannot speak, and what it has taught or told you.
Happy writing!
-
What the half-room refused to say
The room is not whole.
it has been decided for me.
a line exists,
drawn,
enforced:
by cupboard edge,
by shared wall,
by divided bed,
by the way voices travel
only one direction.
my half
learns the discipline of shrinking.
the bed knows how to fold itself
into apology.
the desk keeps its elbows in.
even the window
opens like a compromise,
never fully,
just enough to prove air exists.
nothing here belongs without permission.
the other half:
i do not name it.
i cannot.
i do not have the right.
naming gives it symmetry.
it does not deserve that.
it spills:
light, instructions, inherited noise,
the clatter of a life
that assumes its right to be loud.
my half learns silence
like a second language.
there are nights
when the wall breathes differently.
not alive,
even slightly, but
just aware
of how thin it is.
i have measured that thinness
with my back,
with my listening,
with the way my thoughts
stop mid-sentence.
this room has taught me
how division becomes etiquette.
how you can live entire years
on the smaller side of a decision
you did not make.
how space is not architecture
of autonomy
it is the benevolence
of their permission.
and permission,
like everything else here,
is rationed.
still,
nothing breaks.
not the wall,
not the line,
not the borders,
not the partition,
not the boundary,
not the careful choreography
of staying inside what is mine
only because it was left over.
the room says nothing.
but every day
it rearranges me
into halves
into smaller obediences
and develops,
then quieter partitions
then smaller territories
then enclaves
that do not argue anymore.
~ Oizys.
Day Sixteen
Happy sixteenth day of National/Global Poetry Writing month, everyone!
Our featured daily participant is klara laurenzia linden, who brings us a bilingual response to Day Fifteen’s unusual-love-poem challenge.
Today’s resource is Copper Canyon Press’s “Line/Break” interview series, which brings you half-hour-ish episodes featuring eight contemporary poets.
And last but not least, here’s today’s optional prompt. In “Ocean,” Robinson Jeffers delivers an almost oracular, scriptural description of the sea not just as a geographical phenomenon, but a sort of being – old, wise, profound, and able to teach those who want to learn. Today, try writing a poem in which you describe something that cannot speak, and what it has taught or told you.
Happy writing!
-
What the half-room refused to say
The room is not whole.
it has been decided for me.
a line exists,
drawn,
enforced:
by cupboard edge,
by shared wall,
by divided bed,
by the way voices travel
only one direction.
my half
learns the discipline of shrinking.
the bed knows how to fold itself
into apology.
the desk keeps its elbows in.
even the window
opens like a compromise,
never fully,
just enough to prove air exists.
nothing here belongs without permission.
the other half:
i do not name it.
i cannot.
i do not have the right.
naming gives it symmetry.
it does not deserve that.
it spills:
light, instructions, inherited noise,
the clatter of a life
that assumes its right to be loud.
my half learns silence
like a second language.
there are nights
when the wall breathes differently.
not alive,
even slightly, but
just aware
of how thin it is.
i have measured that thinness
with my back,
with my listening,
with the way my thoughts
stop mid-sentence.
this room has taught me
how division becomes etiquette.
how you can live entire years
on the smaller side of a decision
you did not make.
how space is not architecture
of autonomy
it is the benevolence
of their permission.
and permission,
like everything else here,
is rationed.
still,
nothing breaks.
not the wall,
not the line,
not the borders,
not the partition,
not the boundary,
not the careful choreography
of staying inside what is mine
only because it was left over.
the room says nothing.
but every day
it rearranges me
into halves
into smaller obediences
and develops,
then quieter partitions
then smaller territories
then enclaves
that do not argue anymore.
~ Oizys.
Wednesday, April 15, 2026
NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 15] - In Case Someone Needs Fire
NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 15]
Day Fifteen
Welcome back, all! As of today, we’re halfway through another Na/GloPoWriMo.
Our featured participant today is kellysteller, who brings us an Instagram-inspired response to Day Fourteen’s technology prompt (I think I saw that post about the Japanese insect called the “thorny thornless thorn thorn” myself…)
Today’s resource is the Poetry Unbound podcast. Hosted by Pádraig Ó Tuama, each episode guides you through a single poem.
And now for our prompt (optional, as always). K. Siva Reddy’s poem, “A Love Song Between Two Generations,” weaves together repetitions, questions, and unexpected similes with plain language. The overall effect is both intimate and emotional, producing a long-form meditation on what love is, what it means, and how it acts. Today, we’d like you to write your own poem that muses on love, but isn’t a traditional love poem in the sense of expressing love between romantic partners.
Happy writing!
-
In Case Someone Needs Fire
Some days I walk through myself
like a stranger using the wrong key
I have never belonged to a room
long enough to call it mine
I stand outside conversations
like a chair no one remembers pulling out
even my name sounds borrowed
in my own mouth
But I have watched women carry grief
like it was part of their skeleton
and I cannot turn away
Still, I know the way my mother folds silence
is the same way the city folds its women
My mother taught me how to endure
without ever naming it
I do not trust the world
but I refuse to leave it defenseless
I refuse to abandon it
I do not love people because they are strong
I love them because they are here
I do not love you because you are mine
I love you because no one survives alone
So I keep a match in my mouth
in case someone needs fire.
~ Oizys.
-
Note: I am not usually a writer of love-love, so when I saw today’s prompt I thought, oh, easy. Apparently not. Turns out when the traditional kind doesn’t come naturally to you, the other kinds arrive sideways too... through distance, inheritance, endurance, and the stubborn refusal to stop caring. Anyway, here’s my attempt at a love poem, by my own crooked lights. And I cannot believe we have completed half the challenge already... where did April even go? Also, I wanted to share a resource from my side too: ZinesforFalastin. It feels in conversation with the theme of this poem, so felt right to mention alongside this poem.
Day Fifteen
Welcome back, all! As of today, we’re halfway through another Na/GloPoWriMo.
Our featured participant today is kellysteller, who brings us an Instagram-inspired response to Day Fourteen’s technology prompt (I think I saw that post about the Japanese insect called the “thorny thornless thorn thorn” myself…)
Today’s resource is the Poetry Unbound podcast. Hosted by Pádraig Ó Tuama, each episode guides you through a single poem.
And now for our prompt (optional, as always). K. Siva Reddy’s poem, “A Love Song Between Two Generations,” weaves together repetitions, questions, and unexpected similes with plain language. The overall effect is both intimate and emotional, producing a long-form meditation on what love is, what it means, and how it acts. Today, we’d like you to write your own poem that muses on love, but isn’t a traditional love poem in the sense of expressing love between romantic partners.
Happy writing!
-
In Case Someone Needs Fire
Some days I walk through myself
like a stranger using the wrong key
I have never belonged to a room
long enough to call it mine
I stand outside conversations
like a chair no one remembers pulling out
even my name sounds borrowed
in my own mouth
But I have watched women carry grief
like it was part of their skeleton
and I cannot turn away
Still, I know the way my mother folds silence
is the same way the city folds its women
My mother taught me how to endure
without ever naming it
I do not trust the world
but I refuse to leave it defenseless
I refuse to abandon it
I do not love people because they are strong
I love them because they are here
I do not love you because you are mine
I love you because no one survives alone
So I keep a match in my mouth
in case someone needs fire.
~ Oizys.
-
Note: I am not usually a writer of love-love, so when I saw today’s prompt I thought, oh, easy. Apparently not. Turns out when the traditional kind doesn’t come naturally to you, the other kinds arrive sideways too... through distance, inheritance, endurance, and the stubborn refusal to stop caring. Anyway, here’s my attempt at a love poem, by my own crooked lights. And I cannot believe we have completed half the challenge already... where did April even go? Also, I wanted to share a resource from my side too: ZinesforFalastin. It feels in conversation with the theme of this poem, so felt right to mention alongside this poem.
Tuesday, April 14, 2026
NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 14] - the day after ai was dismantled
NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 14]
Day Fourteen
Happy Tuesday, everyone, and welcome back for the fourteenth day of National/Global Poetry Writing Month. It’s hard to believe we’ve been at this for two weeks already but, well, we have!
Our featured participant for the day is Narrative Paralysis, where the response to Day Thirteen’s landscape prompt brings back to life the remembered ghost of that most characteristic of 1980s American landscapes — a suburban mall.
Today’s resource is the website of the Poetry Translation Centre, a U.K. nonprofit dedicated to making poetry from Asia, Latin America, and Africa available both in the original languages and in English. Many of the poems they present are accompaned by notes on the process of translation, including the specific choices that the translators made in rendering each poem into English.
And now for our (optional!) prompt. Poetry is an ancient art, and one that revisits themes that existed thousands of years ago – love, nature, jealousy. But that doesn’t mean that poets live in a sort of pre-history unaffected by technological advances. Emily Dickinson wrote about trains, and I’m rather charmed by this 1981 poem about the “incredible hair” of actors on television. In a more recent example, Becca Klaver’s “Manifesto of the Lyric Selfie” draws inspiration from the contemporary drive to document everything in digital photographs. Today, we challenge you to write a poem that similarly bridges (whether smoothly or not) the seeming divide between poetry and technological advances.
Happy writing!
-
note: i really like this prompt, maureen. i tend to hoard ideas, waiting for a “perfect” time that never really arrives. so, i always have ideas for poems or pieces sitting around in my head. these prompts have been pushing me to write despite that, to show up with whatever i have left. to stop waiting and just begin. i’ve been meaning to write something about ai and writing for a while now. one of my current favourite poets, officialsadbeige, writes sharply about this... about détournement, algorithms, war, genocide, and the slow erosion of the human in all of it. sharing her here as my resource for today.
-
the day after ai was dismantled
the day after ai was dismantled
i sat by the sea
and kept waiting
for language to come to me
already arranged
but the sea had no such habits
it wrote and erased
wrote and erased
with the same old hand
it had always used
around me
people still held their phones
like extinguished things
like gods gone out
but not yet cold
someone near me said
now we will have to make things ourselves
someone else laughed
the way people laugh
when they are frightened
of being left alone
with their own minds
i thought then
of all the words
i had handed over
on evenings when i was too tired
to reach myself
evenings with office-light still in my eyes
evenings when my head hurt
turmeric under my nails
the sink not yet empty
and the rice still had to be washed
and somebody still needed answering
my phone hot in my hand
my body already speaking
in the language of enough
and i had only enough self left
to outsource the sentence
it was never a god
only a tidy little servant
waiting for me
on the worst evenings
when i was too emptied out
to argue
with it
all the little surrenders
made in the name of ease
all the neat machine-made bridges
laid over the difficult swamp
between feeling
and saying
and then i thought
of the cage waiting for me at home
not iron
not visible
nothing so dramatic
just routine
office tabs
deadlines
just the blue light of the laptop
the pressure cooker
unfinished dishes
domestic hours
messages needing replies
half-written drafts
missed calls from friends i abandoned years ago
work that follows you home
home that waits like work
the old discipline
of being useful
a body that must keep going
as if rest were bad character
even without ai
the cage remained
fluorescent
well managed
password protected
blessed be the locked screen
and the locked jaw
blessed be the women
answering everyone back
such was the prison:
efficient
lit from within
asking for nothing heroic
only your hours
the gulls were ruthless
real things usually are
they wanted food first
not metaphor, living things
the sea too
refused to help me beautifully
it smelled of salt and rot
and something metallic
it kept coughing up
foam
plastic
and the same old noise
it was unhealingly repetitive
it kept returning
to the same damaged edge, eaten line
again and again
as if to say
this is what a body does
when it cannot stop
coming back
i sat there a long time
with my unwritten hands
thinking maybe the machine
was never the only prison
i have spent years
waiting to become the version of myself
who writes before exhaustion
who writes before dinner
before chores
before the body turns against the evening
but most days
i arrive to language late
asking it to take
whatever is left
thinking how easily
a woman is taught
to live behind glass
to stay reachable
pleasant
productive
grateful
and to call that a life
a woman is trained
to live in enclosures
to call them love
to call them family
to call them work
to call them duty
to call them coping
to call them keeping up
and call it being good
and call that goodness freedom
thinking how often
i have mistaken assistance
for rescue
i have mistaken obedience
for love
i have mistaken being easy to manage
for being loved
when i finally stood
nothing
had been repaired
it was all still there
the human was still itself
the sea was still restless
the world still hungry
my life still waiting
with its small metal teeth
but for one brief hour
no voice had tried
to finish my sentence for me
the silence was not kind
but it was mine
and that too
felt like a kind of freedom
~ Oizys.
Day Fourteen
Happy Tuesday, everyone, and welcome back for the fourteenth day of National/Global Poetry Writing Month. It’s hard to believe we’ve been at this for two weeks already but, well, we have!
Our featured participant for the day is Narrative Paralysis, where the response to Day Thirteen’s landscape prompt brings back to life the remembered ghost of that most characteristic of 1980s American landscapes — a suburban mall.
Today’s resource is the website of the Poetry Translation Centre, a U.K. nonprofit dedicated to making poetry from Asia, Latin America, and Africa available both in the original languages and in English. Many of the poems they present are accompaned by notes on the process of translation, including the specific choices that the translators made in rendering each poem into English.
And now for our (optional!) prompt. Poetry is an ancient art, and one that revisits themes that existed thousands of years ago – love, nature, jealousy. But that doesn’t mean that poets live in a sort of pre-history unaffected by technological advances. Emily Dickinson wrote about trains, and I’m rather charmed by this 1981 poem about the “incredible hair” of actors on television. In a more recent example, Becca Klaver’s “Manifesto of the Lyric Selfie” draws inspiration from the contemporary drive to document everything in digital photographs. Today, we challenge you to write a poem that similarly bridges (whether smoothly or not) the seeming divide between poetry and technological advances.
Happy writing!
-
note: i really like this prompt, maureen. i tend to hoard ideas, waiting for a “perfect” time that never really arrives. so, i always have ideas for poems or pieces sitting around in my head. these prompts have been pushing me to write despite that, to show up with whatever i have left. to stop waiting and just begin. i’ve been meaning to write something about ai and writing for a while now. one of my current favourite poets, officialsadbeige, writes sharply about this... about détournement, algorithms, war, genocide, and the slow erosion of the human in all of it. sharing her here as my resource for today.
-
the day after ai was dismantled
the day after ai was dismantled
i sat by the sea
and kept waiting
for language to come to me
already arranged
but the sea had no such habits
it wrote and erased
wrote and erased
with the same old hand
it had always used
around me
people still held their phones
like extinguished things
like gods gone out
but not yet cold
someone near me said
now we will have to make things ourselves
someone else laughed
the way people laugh
when they are frightened
of being left alone
with their own minds
i thought then
of all the words
i had handed over
on evenings when i was too tired
to reach myself
evenings with office-light still in my eyes
evenings when my head hurt
turmeric under my nails
the sink not yet empty
and the rice still had to be washed
and somebody still needed answering
my phone hot in my hand
my body already speaking
in the language of enough
and i had only enough self left
to outsource the sentence
it was never a god
only a tidy little servant
waiting for me
on the worst evenings
when i was too emptied out
to argue
with it
all the little surrenders
made in the name of ease
all the neat machine-made bridges
laid over the difficult swamp
between feeling
and saying
and then i thought
of the cage waiting for me at home
not iron
not visible
nothing so dramatic
just routine
office tabs
deadlines
just the blue light of the laptop
the pressure cooker
unfinished dishes
domestic hours
messages needing replies
half-written drafts
missed calls from friends i abandoned years ago
work that follows you home
home that waits like work
the old discipline
of being useful
a body that must keep going
as if rest were bad character
even without ai
the cage remained
fluorescent
well managed
password protected
blessed be the locked screen
and the locked jaw
blessed be the women
answering everyone back
such was the prison:
efficient
lit from within
asking for nothing heroic
only your hours
the gulls were ruthless
real things usually are
they wanted food first
not metaphor, living things
the sea too
refused to help me beautifully
it smelled of salt and rot
and something metallic
it kept coughing up
foam
plastic
and the same old noise
it was unhealingly repetitive
it kept returning
to the same damaged edge, eaten line
again and again
as if to say
this is what a body does
when it cannot stop
coming back
i sat there a long time
with my unwritten hands
thinking maybe the machine
was never the only prison
i have spent years
waiting to become the version of myself
who writes before exhaustion
who writes before dinner
before chores
before the body turns against the evening
but most days
i arrive to language late
asking it to take
whatever is left
thinking how easily
a woman is taught
to live behind glass
to stay reachable
pleasant
productive
grateful
and to call that a life
a woman is trained
to live in enclosures
to call them love
to call them family
to call them work
to call them duty
to call them coping
to call them keeping up
and call it being good
and call that goodness freedom
thinking how often
i have mistaken assistance
for rescue
i have mistaken obedience
for love
i have mistaken being easy to manage
for being loved
when i finally stood
nothing
had been repaired
it was all still there
the human was still itself
the sea was still restless
the world still hungry
my life still waiting
with its small metal teeth
but for one brief hour
no voice had tried
to finish my sentence for me
the silence was not kind
but it was mine
and that too
felt like a kind of freedom
~ Oizys.
Monday, April 13, 2026
NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 13] - in my village, even the ground refuses me
NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 13]
Day Thirteen
Here in the Land of Na/GloPoWriMo, the thirteenth day of the month isn’t ominous — not when it means another chance to write poems!
Today, our featured participant is verlie burroughs, who brings us a bittersweet response to Day Twelve’s memory-of-a-relative prompt.
Our resource for the day is the Poets House blog, where you’ll find tons of interviews with contemporary poets.
To get started with today’s prompt, first read Walter de la Mare’s poem “A Song of Enchantment.” Then, John Berryman’s poem “Footing Our Cabin’s Lawn, Before the Wood.” Both poems work very differently, yet leave you with a sense of the near-fantastical possibilities of the landscapes they describe. Try your hand today at writing your own poem about a remembered, cherished landscape. It could be your grandmother’s backyard, your schoolyard basketball court, or a tiny strip of woods near the railroad tracks. At some point in the poem, include language or phrasing that would be unusual in normal, spoken speech – like a rhyme, or syntax that feels old-fashioned or high-toned.
Happy writing!
-
in my village, even the ground refuses me
the soil doesn’t hold my footprint,
it loosens, as though i were never meant
to weigh upon it
the well water tastes like someone else’s name,
cool on the tongue,
but it will not answer when i call myself
the courtyard echoes, but not for me,
it returns a boy i have never been
my father walks differently here,
his voice bending at the edges,
as though some older mouth remembers it better
he is less a man
and more a son again
and my grandfather,
he sits in a forgetting that began before me,
his gaze passing through my body
like a wind that does not care for doors
he forgot me
before i could learn the grammar of his hands
so i too became forgettable
o place that claims me:
thou speakest in a blood i cannot hear
i press my ear to the earth,
but it hums with another lineage
and i;
unheld, unnamed, unreturned;
stand where i am from
and fail, still,
to arrive
as if arrival
were meant for someone else
the earth
not answering back
and does not arrive.
~ Oizys.
-
note: i almost missed today. i started writing in the morning, right after the prompt arrived in my mail. but then work engulfed me, then sickness, then household chores, then more work, then cooking, then just… stress piling on. and now, after finally finishing my nightly rituals and tucking myself into bed, i realized my poem was still sitting there... half-done, probably infested with mosquitoes by now. so i picked it back up and finished it with whatever i had left in me. because i really don’t want to break the streak haha.
Sunday, April 12, 2026
NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 12] - the oldest woman i remember
NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 12]
Day Twelve
Welcome back, everyone, for Day Twelve of National/Global Poetry Writing Month!
Today, our featured participant is Kavya Janani U, who brings us a forbiddingly calm response to Day Eleven’s erasure/blackout prompt. It’s very interesting to contrast here the blacked-out text with the original text.
Our daily resource is this essay by the poet Yuki Tanaka on (mis)translation and how unusual or surprising word choices can make a poem come alive.
Finally, here’s today’s (optional) prompt. Amarjit Chandan has a pretty wild biography, but his poetry is often focused on place and memory – with his hometown of Nakodar appearing repeatedly. His poem “Uncle Mohan Singh” recounts, with a sort of dreaminess, a memory of the titular uncle playing the accompaniment to a silent film. Today, we’d like to challenge you to write your own poem that recounts a memory of a beloved relative, and something they did that echoes through your thoughts today.
Happy writing!
-
the oldest woman i remember
i remember her almost by furniture.
my grandmother’s grandmother,
my motherline made visible
for one brief afternoon,
sat on a chair
in the village house
as if she had always been there
while my parents moved through the day
with their younger noise
and my grandmother,
not yet memory herself,
stood nearby,
already practiced
in the old labour of attending.
i was too small
to understand any of it,
to know what it meant
that my grandmother came from her
and i came from my grandmother.
i was too small
to understand lineage,
to understand what it meant
to come from women
who came from women
who came from women.
i was too small
to know what it meant
to belong to so many women at once.
i was too small to know
that a girl first learns womanness
by watching
how women are in a room,
how they sit,
how they wait,
how they are spoken to.
i only knew
that everyone seemed to know
how to place themselves around her.
i do not remember her voice.
i do not remember
the colour of her garment,
the month, the weather,
what anyone said to her.
only this:
she sat there
with such finished stillness
that the whole room
seemed to take its shape from her.
the chair was ordinary.
that is what stays with me.
not carved, not holy,
not ceremonial, not special,
not even remarkable enough
for a child to love at once.
just a chair,
and in it
a woman who had lived long enough
to stop explaining her right
to take up space,
to make quiet look ancestral.
she sat the way
very old trees stand:
very still.
not stiff.
not resting either.
just there.
i think now
that this is part of how womanness arrived to me:
not through mirrors,
not through bangles,
not through the first blood,
not through the first warning,
but through old women,
in the sight of old women
whose bodies had become
archives of use,
what life had asked of them
and what life had done to them,
who sat as if tiredness
proved they had carried something,
who sat with the tiredness
of women who had done everything asked of them
and more,
who took up space
without making anyone comfortable,
without needing to brighten it,
without smiling for it,
without softening age
into something pretty.
she is dead.
my grandmother is dead.
and still the line continues,
not neatly,
definitely not kindly,
but definitely in gestures.
and now, years later,
she returns to me
whenever i see an old woman
lower herself carefully into a chair,
whenever an older woman
takes the edge of a room
and somehow still changes the whole room,
whenever i find myself sitting quietly
at family gatherings,
watching more than speaking,
as if the mothers before me
left instructions in the spine,
as if i had been taught this
without anyone teaching me.
in the way i enter a house
already measuring its silences.
in the way i watch women’s hands
before i trust their words.
in the way i have learned
that to endure is also
a language passed down.
perhaps that was what she did
that has not stopped echoing:
she sat there
so fully in her place
that a little girl, passing through,
could carry the shape of it away
without knowing,
without understanding,
what it meant
to belong to women:
to their hush,
their labour,
their vanishing,
their unspectacular thrones
and carried that shape away
in her body.
~ Oizys.
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