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!

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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.

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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?

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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.

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!

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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.