NaPoWriMo 2025 (April 30th): She Who Burned Beautifully

From NaPoWriMo 2025 (Day Thirty): Wow, we made it, everyone! Today’s the final day of National/Global Poetry Writing Month. We hope you make it to the end of the day with thirty new poems under your belt. But even if you didn’t manage to keep up with the whole poem-a-day thing, we hope you had fun!

We’ll be back tomorrow with our final featured participant and some closing thoughts for the year’s challenge, but in the meantime, our featured participant for today is Catching Lines, who brings us an elegy for Janis Joplin in response to Day 29’s inspired-by-the-music-makers prompt.

Our final resource is MatterPort Discover, a site that lets you take virtual tours of all kinds of museums, ranging from the National Museum of Ireland to the Bicycle Museum of America.

Finally, here’s the last prompt of this year’s Na/GloPoWriMo (optional, as always)! In his meandering poem, “Grateful Dead Tapes,” poet Ed Skoog riffs on the eponymous tapes that he’s found in a secondhand store, remembering various instances of hearing the band, both live and in recording. Today, we’d like to challenge you to write a poem that also describes different times in which you’ve heard the same band or piece of music across your lifetime.

Happy writing!

Note: I almost gave up. And I tried my best to wrap this up without giving up this year. I will always come back to this.

She Who Burned Beautifully

(for the songs that found me when no one else did)

Oizys, mother of the sharpest silences: hear me now.

They played that song again—

the one that howls like a woman unspooling her bones

on marble floors too clean for grief.

I was thirteen, and I screamed.

At him.

At the godfather of my silence.

At the man who carved his name in thunder

and called it parenting.

That day, I tore through the wallpaper of obedience,

raised my voice like a temple bell,

and the song rose with me.

War drums.

Chords like broken bangles.

A voice that wasn’t mine but knew my rage

like a sister.

Years later, locked away in velvet cages

stitched with gold and expectations,

I escaped.

Not with a suitcase—no,

with nothing but a name on my tongue

that meant sorrow and sovereignty:

Oizys.

I walked through strange cities

where no one knew how to pronounce me,

but I played that same song,

a siren of survival,

and the walls of every hotel room shivered

as I danced like a girl unchained

but still carrying her rusted manacles in her purse

like relics.

The air smelled of cardamom and gasoline. My wrists still bore the red threads of home.

The third time I heard it,

I was on the floor of my own apartment,

cold tea beside me,

achievement collapsing like a palace made of sugar.

I whispered:

“I am not capable.”

The song didn’t disagree.

It hummed around me, ancient and cruel,

as if to say—

“Then be incapable.

But burn anyway.”

“Even broken things can echo,” she sang,

and I believed her, for once.

Now when it plays,

I don’t cry.

I open my wrists—not with blades—

but with bracelets of fire,

the kind only a woman forged in rage and ruin can wear.

I sing back.

I sing back, with rusted manacles now melted into melody.

And somewhere,

the gods of HeeraMandi nod from their carved balconies,

their silks stained with blood and rosewater,

knowing I’ve earned my own music.

- Oizys.

Another Note: Things have been difficult recently. I started the challenge with a lot of hope; actually kickstarted early. But once April began, I fell behind a bit. Still, I kept writing bits and pieces for the prompts, thinking I’d post them here and there, eventually. And I did. I found time, caught up, and kept going. And… I got featured. For the first time. Woah. Towards the end, though, things got heavier. More chaos. More anger. More sickness. More weddings (bad…?). More exploitation. More hurt. More loneliness. More humiliation. Just more difficult days. But I stayed. I posted. Even though, near the end, I kept feeling like giving up. Even the second last day, I posted that one quite late. And today’s April 30th prompt too. I didn’t want to give up so easily.

But part of me kept putting it off. Stubborn. Delaying and delaying, maybe because another part didn’t want this to end. That’s always been me: delaying or ignoring endings because I’m scared to confront them. I procrastinate until regret starts swelling in my bones. But this time, I tried. I tried to fight through the pain, through the restraining thoughts and I posted.

Had to write it on mobile. Haha. Not my usual style. Mostly, I do it with my laptop, some randomly old notebooks, a book or two and a pen.

But to win a battle, you do what you have to. I think I’ll always come back to this. That fight—the internal one—was the root of this poem. This month, I stuck to every theme, every prompt, went beyond and above just to hold on to it. But this final one: I took it purely as inspiration. I poured my conflict into it. Let the rage shape it. Let my sorrow speak. And I wrote it. I’ll always come back to this. A flag point. A fire I lit. And proof that even when I thought I couldn't (perfectly)—I did (even if not perfectly).

P.S.: Yeah, I know—it’s all very dramatic and sappy for just a yearly NaPoWriMo post. But hey, when you live inside your head 24/7, even poetry becomes a war diary. Let me have this one.

NaPoWriMo 2025 (April 29th): The Woman Who Chose Absence

From NaPoWriMo 2025 (Day Twenty Nine): Happy Tuesday, all, and happy penultimate day of Na/GloPoWriMo.

Our featured participant today is Adil Akbar, whose response to Day 28’s “music and ceremonies” prompt rather reminds us of César Vallejo.

Today’s daily resource is the online galleries of the Whitney Museum, where you’ll find artwork as varied as this fun portrait of Billie Jean King, a Frank Stella sculpture that looks like what would happen if a space station fell in love with a bridge, and this contemporary take on the classic embroidered sampler.

And now for today’s prompt – optional as always. Just as poetry is made by poets, music is made by musicians. There is always a living being behind the words, the rhythm, and at the heart of every song. Just as music and poetry can fascinate in their own right, so do the personalities behind every form of art. In her poem, “Canary,” Rita Dove riffs on Billie Holiday, and how her life has been spun into myth. Likewise, in “Ode for Donny Hathaway,” Wanda Coleman muses on another tragic figure, in the form of the eponymous soul singer and keyboardist.

Today, we’d like to challenge you to write a poem that takes its inspiration from the life of a musician, poet, or other artist. And while our example poems are squarely elegiac, don’t feel limited to minor-key feelings in your own work.

Happy (?) writing!

NOTE: I am so late I almost forgot about this, and there was a storm, so I fell asleep like a baby and woke up in the middle of the night to write for this prompt, and got distracted for a couple of hours arranging some hundred random links and messages. So, I am absolutely delirious right now. I’ve twisted this prompt into a deliciously conspiratorial one. I’m going to take a writer/poet who’s used a pseudonym (someone cryptic, semi-anonymous, hiding in plain sight, but never known) and from there, build a fictional "real self" behind the mask of their persona. Kind of Paul Auster meets Roberto Bolaño, a bit of postmodern noir with poetic ruin scrawled into the margins.

BACKDROP: 

Inspiration: Elena Ferrante (Italy)

We still don’t really know who Ferrante is. Yes, journalists have made various claims, even using financial records and real estate deeds to try and "out" her, but Ferrante, the author of the Neapolitan Novels, has insisted that the anonymity is part of the work. She writes in Italian, but her voice is global, intimate, and terrifyingly raw. She embodies womanhood, class struggle, memory, and creative obsession with such eerie precision that it feels lived like a diary whispered into an attic floorboard. So now… let’s do what the world doesn’t know. I will be unearthing a dossier lost in the Vatican’s forbidden archives or smuggled out of some smoky Milanese literary salon.

• Name: Rafaella di Lupo
• Born: March 17, 1949
• Birthplace: Oliveto Lucano, a nowhere village where wolves outnumber buses.
• Occupation: Midwife by day, illegal bookseller by night.
• Education: Taught to read by a nun who carved quotes from Dante into tree bark.
• Wrote her first novel in goat’s blood and blackberry ink (revised later with a biro).
• Never married, not out of principle but forgetfulness.
• Favorite word: estraneo (stranger).
• Believes literature is an exorcism, not entertainment.
• Theory: She lives in a crumbling house built into a cliffside. Her manuscripts are mailed via a boy who doesn’t speak. She’s got a wall covered in torn-apart pages of Simone Weil, Lucia Berlin, and Rimbaud. Each character she writes is a person she tried, and failed, to become.
• Status: Active. Undocumented. Believed to be a non-person under Italian citizenship records post-1977.
• Last Seen: Leaving the port of Salerno in 1989, wrapped in a shawl stitched with marginalia.
• Only writes between 3:12 a.m. and 4:01 a.m., convinced that’s when memory is most porous and shame is still half-asleep.
• Considers all novels to be confessionals, but lies constantly—especially when telling the truth.
• Sends edits to her translator on torn scraps of brown butcher paper. Each one ends with the same phrase: “Burn after meaning.”
• The Apartment on Via delle Ombre: An address without a buzzer. Inside, stacks of books double as furniture. The walls are hand-painted with notes from a diary she insists she didn’t write. On the kitchen table:
• One fountain pen.
• A teacup full of red wine.
• A playing card with the queen’s face scratched out.
• A letter from someone named “Lenù” that ends: “You wrote me into being, and then you left me here. I hope your ghosts are kinder than mine.”
• Rumors & Red Threads:
• In the 70s, she was rumored to have translated Ingeborg Bachmann under a pseudonym which later disappeared from the publisher’s catalogue.
• She once mailed a manuscript soaked in sea salt and bundled in fishing net. When opened, every third word was smeared—readers described it as “the most emotionally accurate censorship of grief.”
• Her handwriting allegedly resembles that of three separate literary women, now dead, all unrelated. A coincidence? Or a composite ghost?
• Hidden Bibliography: 
• The Silence of Garlic (1975): a novella allegedly about cooking, but actually about sexual shame and Catholic repression.
• Figlia Della Neve (“Daughter of Snow”): unpublished, rumored to exist only in oral form, passed between women who meet in candlelit libraries once a decade.
• The Left Side of the Bed: poems so elliptical and cryptic they’ve been banned in Naples for “inducing familial unrest.”
• Final Truth (or Lie?): There is no Ferrante. There never was. There was only the woman who chose absence louder than presence and in that absence, we all found a mirror.

The Woman Who Chose Absence

{Inspired by the invented secret identity behind the pseudonym 'Elena Ferrante' — Rafaella di Lupo, the woman who chose absence over fame.}

In Oliveto Lucano, where the wolves sang first,
she was born; not wept for, but noted,
like a comma in the parish ledger.

By day, she pulled screaming souls from the screaming dark.
By night, she stitched forbidden words into the hems of her skirts.
The villagers said the wind in the cliffs spelled her name,
but they never agreed on the spelling.

At 3:12 a.m., while the shame still slept,
she dipped her pen in blackberry blood,
writing not stories,
but exorcisms,
each word a scream swallowed inside a stranger’s throat.

Her manuscripts sailed from her cliffside —
carried by a boy who had no tongue,
wrapped in butcher paper that smelled of salt,
marked with a warning:

Burn after meaning.

No portrait remains. Only furniture made of books.
Only a teacup that never spills.
Only a letter, unsigned, reading:

"You wrote me into being.
You left me in the mirror.
I hope your ghosts are kinder than mine."

Some say she dissolved into salt spray.
Some say she inked herself into disappearance.
Some say Ferrante is a myth we made,
when we needed a woman to blame
for telling the truth so beautifully
we wanted her dead for it.

- Oizys.