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!
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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.
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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.
Tuesday, April 21, 2026
NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 21] - Names for a Thing That Refuses to Stay Named
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.
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