From NaPoWriMo 2025 (Day Seventeen): Welcome back, everyone, for the seventeenth day of Na/GloPoWriMo.
Today’s featured participant is Words with Ruth, where the soundtrack-inspired poem for Day Sixteen uses repetition, along with simple and conversational language, to convincingly recreate a moment in space and time.
Our resource today is Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, where you can find a smug ceramic pelican, a samurai’s ceremonial suit of armor, and a photograph of the French impressionist painter Camille Pissarro dressed as a Venezuelan herdsman.
And now for our daily optional prompt. The surrealist painters Remedios Varo and Leonora Carrington moved to Mexico during the height of World War II, where they began a life-long friendship. Today, we’d like to challenge you to write a poem themed around friendship, with imagery or other ideas taken from a painting by Carrington, and a painting by Varo.
Happy writing!
NOTE: Things are a bit much right now, and I wish they weren’t. I wish I had it in me to write something fresh for this prompt. Because I love it. But I’m running on fumes. So instead, I’m offering up a poem that’s been quietly marinating in my compost pile of drafts.
I know this is far too long, and I apologize for crowding the comments like a spilled drawer. But once I started recycling this old piece, I couldn’t stop. It felt like someone kicked open the floodgates and suddenly, emotions I didn’t even know I was holding came out like projectile boke.
It’s not polished. It’s not blog-ready. But I didn’t want to give up today. Didn’t want to break my streak.
We Kept Our Secrets in a Soup Made of Stars
for Leonora and Remedios
In the greenhouse of her memory, I found a fox sleeping in a teacup.
Its tail curled like a question mark no one had the courage to ask.
The glass panes were fogged with forgotten songs,
and vines grew from the cracks in her voice,
whispering spells in languages only we remembered.
We kept our secrets in a soup made of stars —
simmered in silence, stirred with the long-handled spoon
of nights when the war outside forgot our names.
Each constellation melted on our tongues like sugar.
We laughed like women who knew the moon by her first name.
We wept like alchemists who'd lost the recipe for joy.
But we never burned the soup.
She wore her past like a fox fur
and I never asked where it bit.
There are wounds you don’t name in daylight.
There are truths that grow wings in the dark.
I braided her hair with threads of eclipse,
while she stitched doorways in my spine —
just in case we ever needed to leave this world quietly.
Even now, when I pass a greenhouse,
I listen for the soft breath of teacup foxes,
and the rustle of stars boiling in old pots.
She Came Back Wearing the Wind
a sequel to “We Kept Our Secrets in a Soup Made of Stars”
The fox has left the teacup.
The greenhouse collapsed under the weight of forgetting.
Vines grew teeth.
Sunlight turned its back.
I looked for her in the wallpaper —
found only teeth and hydrangeas.
She always said flowers knew more than they let on.
At first, I thought grief was just a mispronunciation of time.
But then the clocks refused to tick.
And the soup spoiled.
I kept trying
Instructions for Breathing Under Water —
but forgot the part where lungs
become gills through memory alone.
If the stars taste like ash, drink anyway.
Memory ferments.
It burns going down, but it teaches.
Once, I built a bridge of clock parts and cats
just to cross into her dream.
You wore a hat made of postcards, I said.
You shrugged, handed me a compass that pointed to your laugh.
I brought soup in a thermos of thunder.
You sipped it,
said it needed more lightning.
Years passed like stubborn ghosts.
I stitched days together with threads of old laughter,
hid love letters in jars of honey,
waited.
And then one night —
she came back wearing the wind.
She knocked at the door like rain with purpose.
Her eyes were full of unspoken weather.
We didn’t speak.
We didn’t need to.
The air hummed with unfinished lullabies.
She handed me a single fox whisker and a spoon carved from moonbone.
I offered her hydrangeas.
In the kitchen, the kettle screamed like old joy.
We sat, back to back,
and wrote our next secrets
on the steam rising from the soup.
The Fox Was Never There
the truth tastes like rust and rosemary
The soup was cold in the bowl
long before I noticed.
The chair across from me —
empty, as it had always been.
The spoon never stirred itself.
The wind didn’t carry her in.
It just howled.
She came back wearing the wind?
No.
I wore the storm.
I carved her silhouette out of steam and sorrow,
painted her voice onto the kettle’s scream,
stitched her smile from the fog on the windows.
I built her
the way a child builds gods:
out of need.
The fox was never in the teacup.
Just a crack in the porcelain,
shaped almost like a tail.
I looked again at the wallpaper —
no hydrangeas.
Only mildew, peeling like skin.
And the teeth?
Mine.
The bridge of clock parts and cats?
It led nowhere.
Just a table leg missing a screw.
Just a postcard hat I folded myself
from the ones she never sent.
I read our old instructions
by candlelight, hoping the wax would remember:
Breathe slowly. Don’t resist the flood.
BIf your heart turns to stone, write on it.
But the ink blurred.
Even memory ferments into something sour.
I’ve been writing her back into existence for years.
Feeding her poems.
Bathing her in metaphor.
Singing lullabies to ghosts
in case she’s listening.
But tonight, I’ll say it:
She’s gone.
Not lost.
Not wandering.
Not whispering from the other room.
Gone.
And I am still here,
in this crumbling greenhouse,
boiling stars that will never speak her name.
The Other Side of the Teacup
or, Where I Went When the World Forgot Me
You kept calling me like thunder calls the sea.
But I was already past the shoreline.
I walked backwards into the mirror
and found a world that didn’t ache
with your name.
No —
I didn’t leave.
I unraveled.
One thread at a time.
Quiet as a fox on the run.
The day I disappeared,
I followed a crack in the floorboards
and it whispered a better story.
One without teeth in the wallpaper.
One without soup made of sorrow stars.
There, I became weather.
I was rain in someone else’s garden.
I was the hum in a cactus spine.
I was not missing —
I was everywhere you didn’t look.
Yes, I saw you.
Writing me back with fevered fingers.
Feeding poems to a ghost
in hopes she’d stay hungry.
But I was already full —
of silence,
of salt,
of the relief of vanishing.
I wore my past like fox fur too.
But I always knew where it bit.
You just didn’t want to ask.
You didn’t want my truth —
you wanted the version that cried in metaphor
and came home like thunder softened.
You wanted me cracked and mythical.
You wanted me loyal to your dream of me.
But I am not your revenant.
I am not your resurrection spell.
I am not soup,
or secret,
or something you get to finish.
I am still walking backwards into mirrors,
wearing wind like a crown,
tasting freedom like starlight
that no longer burns.
Let me go, love.
The fox left the teacup
because the teacup was always yours.
The Fox Refuses to Choose Sides
an oracle's lament in fur and bone
I never promised loyalty.
I was warm,
yes.
Curled.
Silent.
But silence isn’t agreement — it’s survival.
You both thought I was yours.
Your metaphor.
Your memory.
Your proof.
She called me myth.
You called me metaphor.
I am neither.
I am teeth and fur and instinct.
I left the teacup because
you made it a reliquary.
You kept feeding it with your sadness,
expecting resurrection.
Expecting me to stay curled like history.
But I am no shrine-keeper.
I am the thing that leaves.
I watched you both
sew each other into stories
so tightly,
you couldn’t breathe without the other’s ghost.
She walked into mirrors.
You built her a cathedral of clocks.
Both beautiful.
Both unlivable.
You want to know the truth?
There was love.
Not the kind you write poems about —
the kind that bruises when held too long.
The kind that doesn’t survive translation.
Now you look for meaning
in hydrangeas and wallpaper teeth,
while she becomes weather
on someone else's skin.
Let her go.
Let yourself go.
I am the fox.
I return only to ruins
to remind you:
Some things end.
Some stories are only beautiful