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.

Someone is always leaving in my poems,
a door half-open, a coat still on its hook.

The story begins to eat itself;
the way a good peach does, from the inside out.

I put bruised next to Tuesday.
Give them a moment. Sometimes they hold.

Painting without brushes, I drag
the wrong words across the sentence

until something bleeds through—a cardinal
at the birdbath that means my mother.

I don’t say that. I let the bird
be red.

Landscape: the road wet from last night.
Portrait: a man carrying grief

the way you carry groceries
too far from the car.

Abstract: a blue room
rearranging itself.

A poem holds what prose keeps dropping:
the peach, the bruise, the moment before you bite.

Prompt Inspiration

Via NaPoWriMo

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.

Thanks very much for reading, subscribing, and sharing the stories, poetry, and essays in this space. If you like a story, poem, or essay, please click on the heart. Also if you are so moved, please leave a comment.

Subscribe now

Refer a friend

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.

Aurora borealis: a rough draft
the sky keeps starting over, or the atmosphere
trying on colors before it settles on dark,
or a river: uphill, glowing, without a name.
I want to call it beautiful but beautiful
is what we say when we run out of words,
and I haven’t run out yet.
Oh, the words I’ve run out of!
Borealis from boreas, the north wind;
the wind that carries the light,
or the light that rides the wind.
We named the thing for what brought it.
Which is how naming usually goes.
My mother died in 2014.
My dog last August.
Two directions I keep pointing at
without a name for the space between them.
Someone told me the lights are brightest
in the hours before dawn.
I believe this without having seen it.
Aurora: the goddess, but also just
that hour when dark starts to admit something.
A rough draft the sky keeps starting,
still running uphill, still unnamed,
still that river nobody finished mapping
before the cold came in.

Prompt Inspiration

Via NaPoWriMo

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.

Thanks very much for reading, subscribing, and sharing the stories, poetry, and essays in this space. If you like a story, poem, or essay, please click on the heart. Also if you are so moved, please leave a comment.

Subscribe now

Refer a friend

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.

So, I didn't follow the brief (exactly), but this spooky event from my childhood came to mind, took hold, and wouldn't let go.

My father was at the plant,
	called in by the night shift manager,
	some problem only he could fix.
Everyone asleep, the house still.

I had a library book open,
	three days already late,
	a murder I needed to finish.

Footsteps crossed the hall.
Bathroom faucet: on.
Full bore, the way he always left it.

Then past my door, into the kitchen—
	pots, the sound of someone
	looking in the wrong cabinet.

I called his name.
	Turn it off.
My mother’s voice came back:
	he’s been asleep beside me
		this whole time.

In her room, my brother lay
	the way only he can sleep:
	a rock, a fact, inert and total.
He still can.

Faucet still running.
My mother shut it off.

We had both heard the walk
	from bathroom to kitchen.
We had both heard the pots.

No one came out
	of the kitchen. No one
	came back down the hall.
We stood in the doorway
	longer than we needed to.

Then we went back to bed,
	the three of us,
		in her room.

My book still open on mine.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Prompt Inspiration

Via NaPoWriMo

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.

Thanks very much for reading, subscribing, and sharing the stories, poetry, and essays in this space. If you like a story, poem, or essay, please click on the heart. Also if you are so moved, please leave a comment.

Subscribe now

Refer a friend

Try your hand today at your own take on a villanelle, and have the poem end on a question.

She had stories. The stroke took them away.
Her mouth moved, sounds that meant something only to her.
Three miles of neighborhood streets, and we were there.

The nurse explained what we could expect: the breathing,
long pauses. We nodded. We stayed.
She had stories. The stroke took them away

before she knew they’d go. The summer she visited
New York City. The neighbor’s dog that followed her home.
Three miles of neighborhood streets, and we were there

within the hour. The room was ordinary. Bright.
Her hands on the sheet. We held them.
She had stories. The stroke took them away,

and we had learned to sit with what was left;
her face still hers, her breath becoming slow and even.
Three miles of neighborhood streets, and we were there

when she went. Peaceful: a word people reach for
and mean. Her breath. Then ours. Then the long strange after.
She had stories. The stroke took them away.
Three miles of neighborhood streets—where did they go?

Prompt Inspiration

Via NaPoWriMo

Today’s prompt takes its inspiration from Kiki Petrosino’s loose villanelle, “Nursery.”

Thanks very much for reading, subscribing, and sharing the stories, poetry, and essays in this space. If you like a story, poem, or essay, please click on the heart. Also if you are so moved, please leave a comment.

Subscribe now

Refer a friend

Today, we’d like to challenge you to write your own poem in which the speaker is in dialogue with him or herself.

Inside me lives a small, opinionated wren.
She disapproves of most things.
“That coat,” she’ll say, “looks like a bad apology.”
It’s cold, I tell her. Warmth is the point.
“Warmth,” she says, “is never the point.”
She came to me around forty. Before that
I made plans and kept them, mostly.
Now she chimes in at the produce section,
at the moment I say “I’m fine”
when I’m somewhere between fine and not.
“Which is it?” she asks.
“Both,” I say.
“At the same time?”
“Yes.”
She considers this and drops the subject,
which feels like a concession. It isn’t.
When my mother died she went quiet.
Two full weeks at the base of my sternum, still.
I kept waiting for some small instruction.
Nothing came. I didn’t know I needed that.
Now she thinks I should write more.
The garden, she says, can manage itself.
“But the hellebores—” I start.
“Will do what hellebores do,” she says,
“with or without your supervision.”
She has already picked out a pot on the porch
and begun arranging things to her liking.
I ask if she’s planning to stay.
She tilts her head the way wrens tilt their heads,
which means she has no answer,
or has one she finds too obvious to say.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Prompt Inspiration

Via NaPoWriMo

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.”

Thanks very much for reading, subscribing, and sharing the stories, poetry, and essays in this space. If you like a story, poem, or essay, please click on the heart. Also if you are so moved, please leave a comment.

Subscribe now

Refer a friend

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!

Today, I chose Ghost Pipe because it's in our woods in more than one place. And also because it's a fascinating plant with no chlorophyll, that lives off the fungi that live off oak trees.

Five names for the same pale stalk—
ghost pipe, Indian pipe, corpse plant,
fairy smoke, ice plant—
as if whoever stumbled on it first
had to name it before they could walk away.

Ghost pipe: yes. That hollow bow.
A cluster of them rising from the mulch
like something that hasn’t decided yet
whether it belongs here or somewhere else entirely.

Indian pipe: someone else’s name
pressed onto someone else’s world.
You know how that went.

Corpse plant. Those people didn’t want to get close.
Hard to argue.

Fairy smoke. Someone’s grandmother, maybe,
telling a child don’t touch,
then relenting: but isn’t it something.

Monotropa uniflora: turning once,
toward one flower. Latin doing
what Latin does, describing the shape
as if that settles it.

No chlorophyll. No green.
Lives off fungi that live off oak roots;
all of it happening underground
where no one has thought to name anything yet.

Up here: just this.
White and waxy, already going black at the edges;
the minute you touch it,
it starts forgetting your name.

Prompt Inspiration

Via NaPoWriMo

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.

Thanks very much for reading, subscribing, and sharing the stories, poetry, and essays in this space. If you like a story, poem, or essay, please click on the heart. Also if you are so moved, please leave a comment.

Subscribe now

Refer a friend

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.

I chose to write about the kitsune (Japanese shapeshifting fox) as “an animal that shows up in myths and legends…” I did think about the usual suspects, a dragon, a unicorn, or an owl, but wanted something a little more exotic. Plus, I have foxes on the brain as we have a fox family with at least two kits in our woods.

She moves the way a fox moves
	at dusk, through yards that 
	belong to other people,
	one ear tipped toward whatever comes next,
carrying that old kitsune talent for finding the seam
	between what’s offered and what’s kept,
	her whole body adjusting to the gap before 
	she’s even through it,
which isn’t myth exactly, just the thing you learn
	when staying too long in any one shape
	costs you something you can’t name and 
	can’t afford to lose,
and if she laughed when she said 
	I’ve never been where I was expected,
	that wasn’t deflection but the straightest 
	thing she’d told you all evening,
	the way a fox, crossing a road at night, 
	owns every inch of its own crossing,
before the dark takes it back, 
	before you remember
	it was there at all—leaving you
	with a warm place on the ground and 
	the long diminishing sound of 
gone.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Prompt Inspiration

Via NaPoWriMo

Start by reading the poem below, written by Carl Phillips:

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.

Thanks very much for reading, subscribing, and sharing the stories, poetry, and essays in this space. If you like a story, poem, or essay, please click on the heart. Also if you are so moved, please leave a comment.

Subscribe now

Refer a friend

Today, pick a flower or two (or a whole bouquet, if you like) from this online edition of Kate Greenaway’s Language of Flowers. Now, write your own poem in which you muse on your selections’ names and meanings. If you’re so inclined, you could even do some outside research into your flowers, and incorporate facts that you learn into your work.

Forget Me Not
	Myosotis—mouse-ear, Greeks said,
	for the shape of a leaf. A knight drowned
	gathering them along a riverbank,
	his last words tossed to a woman on shore.
	True love. Such a small and common request.

Foxglove
	Digitalis. Count the flowers up a spike:
	forty, sixty, a whole staircase of bells.
	Physicians boil the leaves into heart medicine.
	The dose that heals and the dose that kills,
	almost the same number of drops.

Phlox
	Phlox is Greek for flame.
	These small pink stars have no opinion,
	ask nothing of the soil but drainage,
	spread without argument through a garden—
	unanimity, the kind that needs no discussion.

Purple Lilac
	Pan loved Syrinx. She became a reed.
	He cut her into pipes and called it music.
	Every time you smell a lilac in April,
	that’s the first emotion of love—
	before you know what it will cost you.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Prompt Inspiration

Via NaPoWriMo

The word florilegium refers to a book of botanical illustrations of decorative plants and also a collection of excerpts from other writings. In her poem, “Florilegium,” Canadian poet Sylvia Legris gathers together many five-lined stanzas that describe flowers but also play with the sounds of their names, their medical (or poisonous) qualities, and historical aspects of herbalism.

Thanks very much for reading, subscribing, and sharing the stories, poetry, and essays in this space. If you like a story, poem, or essay, please click on the heart. Also if you are so moved, please leave a comment.

Subscribe now

Refer a friend

Today, we don’t challenge you to write all of a long, dramatic, narrative poem, but we invite you to try your hand at writing a poem that could be a section or piece of one. Include rhyme, include unlikely and dramatic scenes (maybe a poem about a bank robbery! Or an avalanche! Or Roman gladiators! Or an enormous ball held by mermaids, where there is an undercurrent (hee) of palace intrigue!) Basically, a poem with the plot of an opera (evil twins! Egyptian tombs! Star-crossed lovers! Tigers for no apparent reason!)

I chose to write a narrative poem about a garden witch with a surprising familiar.

I.
They called him a grower of things; low praise,
the kind men use when they mean to diminish.
He kept a garden at the edge of the wood
where the field ran thin and the pine threw shade,
and something about the place stayed fed:
rye tall through the August drought,
a dead graft blooming before the cold had lifted,
bees arriving weeks before anyone’s clover opened.
Nobody asked how. That was the first mistake.

II.
Three men rode out on a morning in May
with a warrant half-forged and a plan for the day.
They’d cleared out a healer last month in the hills,
they’d run off a woman whose land paid their bills.
Here was a grower alone in his rows—
here was a warrant, and nobody knows
a thing about warrants once fear takes the throat.
They rode down the valley in confident note.
They called at the fence in the hour before noon.
He came out with a spade. They expected him soon
to pale, to recede, to surrender what’s his;
but his eyes were the color of old iron, and his
left hand dropped low, pressed into the dirt,
and none of them noticed. That was what hurt.

III.
He planted something while they read him the warrant.
Small gesture. They didn’t see.
The bailiff laughed. The cousin stepped forward.
The dog snapped its lead and lunged for his throat—
and the garden moved.
Not wind-in-the-rye moved. Not that.
The way a garden moves when it decides to.
Vine to the ankle. Root across the boot.
Rye came down like a wall, and through it
came something black and enormous
that had been lying in the furrows all morning,
so still it had looked like a shadow of nothing.
The panther set one paw on the bailiff’s chest
and breathed.

IV.
The warrant lifted into the field.
The men ran after it, more or less,
and the cousin left a boot.
He stood in the wreck of his rows,
the great cat leaning into his hip.
He pressed his fingers into black fur.
You’ve made a mess of the rye, he said.
The panther said nothing (in the way of panthers)
and licked his wrist once, hard.
He knelt, both palms flat to the ground,
and by evening the rows stood straight again.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Prompt Inspiration

Via NaPoWriMo

When I was growing up, there was a book of poems in my house (I believe it was The Best Loved Poems of the American People) that was heavy on long, maudlin, narrative poems with lots and lots of rhyme – the sort of verse that used to be parodied on Bulwinkle’s Corner. As the twentieth century rolled in, poems like this were relegated to the status of stuff-schoolkids-were-forced-to-memorize, and they plummeted even further into our cultural memory-hole as learning poems by heart fell out of educational currency. But while some work in this style is extremely cringeworthy (I’m looking at you, “Bingen on the Rhine”), they can also be very fun to read. Take, for example, Sadakichi Hartmann’s “The Pirate,” or Alfred Noyes’s “The Highwayman.” The action is dramatic, there’s lots of emotions, and the imagery is striking.

Thanks very much for reading, subscribing, and sharing the stories, poetry, and essays in this space. If you like a story, poem, or essay, please click on the heart. Also if you are so moved, please leave a comment.

Subscribe now

Refer a friend

For today’s challenge, write a poem in which you respond to a favorite poem by another poet.

A favorite poem of mine is: 

THE PEACE OF WILD THINGS
by Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

This is my response.

WHAT THE HERON DOES NEXT 
by Caro Henry

Wendell, I went.
Not in despair, more
that 3 a.m. thing
with no name for it,
just feet on cold floor
and then the path downhill.

Creek at the bottom,
heron in his patience,
reed-still, neck kinked back.

And something in me did
what you said it would. I’ll give you that.

But then he struck—and that water
closed over the absence like nothing
had happened. Which was true.
One small fish gone from the world,
and the heron already still again.

Grace is real. I stood in it.

But on the way back up the hill
I was counting again:
bills, the news, what I’d said
wrong the week before.
Heron didn’t follow.
Why would he?

Prompt Inspiration

Via NaPoWriMo

Sergio Raimondi’s poem, “Today Matsuo Basho Cooks,” plays on the following haiku by (you guessed it), Matsuo Basho:

Crimson pepper pod!
Add two pairs of wings, and look—
darting dragonfly.

Thanks very much for reading, subscribing, and sharing the stories, poetry, and essays in this space. If you like a story, poem, or essay, please click on the heart. Also if you are so moved, please leave a comment.

Subscribe now

Refer a friend

Today, try writing a poem in which you describe something that cannot speak, and what it has taught or told you.

No preference for who shelters under it—
	fox or grief, it holds the same.
The year ice split its main fork,
	it grew over the split, made a new shape,
	the way of surviving that isn’t
	really surviving.
Screech owls nested in the heart-rot above the scar.
Two lovers returned to it that summer
	and stood in its shadow and said nothing
	worth recording.
Longer than your counting.
I took the lightning twice.
	Raccoons know the east hollow.
	Deer bed against the south root.
	In October the squirrel buries near the drip line,
		and in spring finds none of it.
What the oak told me when I stopped asking:
you think the wound is separate from the wood.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Prompt Inspiration

Via NaPoWriMo

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.

Thanks very much for reading, subscribing, and sharing the stories, poetry, and essays in this space. If you like a story, poem, or essay, please click on the heart. Also if you are so moved, please leave a comment.

Subscribe now

Refer a friend

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.

My musing on love, in all its forms, and the persistent human impulse to turn outward toward others.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

What are you measuring
when you say love—
	the gap, or the years
	that made the gap
		feel natural?

A neighbor I don't know well
brought a casserole to my door
after my mother-in-law died.
	Why did she?
Agape, maybe. Or just
a neighbor with extra.

Eros isn’t only heat.
	It’s the poem that gets into you
	like grit in a shoe,
		something you keep feeling
		until you stop and look.

Philia.
	Friend who shows Tuesday
		when nobody scheduled it.
	Dog at the door.
	A letter that arrives
		as if it knew.

You keep turning toward people and pets,
can’t quite stop.

Is that love,
	or the way longing moves—
		always outward,
	looking for something to land on?​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Prompt Inspiration

Via NaPoWriMo

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.

Thanks very much for reading, subscribing, and sharing the stories, poetry, and essays in this space. If you like a story, poem, or essay, please click on the heart. Also if you are so moved, please leave a comment.

Subscribe now

Refer a friend

One Hundred-Word Wonders is a writing challenge that highlights how stories can shine even when they’re very short. In the world of micro-fiction, writers create whole tales using only a handful of sentences.

These tiny stories prove how much can be said with very few words, surprising readers with the depth and feeling packed into just a hundred words. How can a story truly come alive in such a small space? Let’s dive in and find out.

Today’s prompt is:

SINNERS

1. Write a story, poem, or creative non-fiction piece using exactly 100 words. The title doesn’t count toward the word limit. To make sure your work is exactly 100 words, you can use WordCounter or any writing software you prefer.

2. Copy and paste your 100-word piece, along with its title, into a comment below. If you want, feel free to share it on your own Substack site or Substack Notes, and include a link back to this page.

3. If a response touches you, don’t hesitate to tap the little hearts in the comment section.

4. There’s no deadline for these prompts.

5. You’ll find my own response below (a poem, natch, in keeping with NaPoWriMo).

What the River Keeps

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

Everyone knew
sins settle at the bottom
of the Monocacy River,
no shrieking,
merely shifting
like silt after rain.

Children skipped stones across anyway,
daring each other
to touch the surface.

Priest, pastor, rabbi
blessed it once, together.
River drank the holy water,
ran faster.

Older women heard them down there
on still nights,
all that weight, moving.

Delia waded in on a dare,
age nine,
came out speaking Spanish
she had never been taught.

Her mother screamed.

Down the road,
her grandfather,
silent for twenty years,
opened the front door,
walked onto the porch,
said Mija
and nothing else.

Author's Note

• Look for a new One Hundred-Word Wonders prompt every third Wednesday of the month.

• The next prompt will drop 20 May 2026.

• Check out other writing prompts from: : Justin Deming’s Fifties by the Fire; : The Fiction Dealer’s Microdosing, and : Prompt Station on Writer Pilgrim's Substack.

2024 THEMES and PROMPTS

Theme: Pride/Humility, Prompt: Race | Theme: Greed/Generosity, Prompt: Childhood Game | Theme: Wrath/Joy, Prompt: Rat, Honey, Candle | Theme: Envy/Contentment, Prompt: Carnival | Theme: Lust/Love, Prompt: Wish | Theme: Gluttony/Temperance, Prompt: Firefly | Theme: Sloth/Vigor, Prompt: Embrace | Bartender | Journey | Abandon | Flight | Hibernate

2025 PROMPTS

Judgment | Pardon | Tired | Grave | Seize the Moment | Lost in Translation | Coma | Concentration, Transmit, False | But What Do I Know? | A Family Secret | Bright Light

2026 PROMPTS

An Affair to Remember | Eyes Wide Shut | Some Like it Hot/Do the Right Thing | Sinners

Thanks very much for reading, subscribing, and sharing the stories, poetry, and essays in this space. If you like a story, poem, or essay, please click on the heart. Also if you are so moved, please leave a comment.

Subscribe now

Refer a friend

Today, we challenge you to write a poem that similarly bridges (whether smoothly or not) the seeming divide between poetry and technological advances.

Before GPS, a gas station man
drew the turn after the school
on a paper bag. Forty years
he’d lived here.

Now the phone knows.
Knew before I asked.

Blue dot moving through blue lines
on a street that has no color in real life,
only asphalt, cut grass
coming through the window.

Turn left in 500 feet.

I turn.

The voice carries no memory of the dead end,
or October, a county road,
sun going down,
crying into a map that had no update.

It won’t forgive a missed turn either.
Just: recalculating.

As though the world is always correctable,
the route rebuilt from here.

Prompt Inspiration

Via NaPoWriMo

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.

Thanks very much for reading, subscribing, and sharing the stories, poetry, and essays in this space. If you like a story, poem, or essay, please click on the heart. Also if you are so moved, please leave a comment.

Subscribe now

Refer a friend

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.

Up in the cherry, leaves
made something of me: not exactly hidden,
more disappeared into June,
that green which holds a girl
the way a secret holds itself.

The boy next door mowed
his father’s grass in rows.
He never looked up.

I had a book, or none.
Just the branch’s give
under my weight, cherries past ripe,
no one picking, wasps
working what had fallen.

What kept thee there, girl?
and yet I kept;
that hour before dinner
when everything waited
and I did not have to.

His head moved back and forth
at the fence. Not one thought
in him that I existed.
Not one.

The bark left lines in my palms
through dinner. My mother spoke
and I was somewhere else entirely,
my hands in my lap like a map
of where I’d just been.

The cherry tree was mine in a way nothing else was at that age. A sanctuary, if that word isn’t too grand for a girl wedged into the fork of a backyard tree. It held me. I could think there, or not think, which was better. It also happened to overlook the neighbor’s yard perfectly. That was its own pleasure; to see without being seen, to want something from a safe distance, up in the leaves with the wasps and the overripe cherries, entirely invisible, entirely alive.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Prompt Inspiration

Via NaPoWriMo

… 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.

Thanks very much for reading, subscribing, and sharing the stories, poetry, and essays in this space. If you like a story, poem, or essay, please click on the heart. Also if you are so moved, please leave a comment.

Subscribe now

Refer a friend

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.

*Photo shows the flower of the lignum vitae tree.

Jamaica. A lignum vitae on our property,
older than anyone alive could say.
Aunt Elsie decided we should picnic under it.
	She fixed sandwiches, sliced cake,
found an old bedspread, folded it twice,
smoothed each crease flat over the roots.
	We ate. Above us the tree held still,
the way old things do.
	Then a small squeal,
and she pressed the cake dish down,
fast, her hand already moving
before any of us knew why.
	She packed everything.
Ushered us inside. Shut the door.
	Scorpion, she said.
Just that. One word.
Her hands after—how steady.
	How she steered each of us
by the shoulder, toward the house,
like she was putting the afternoon
somewhere safe.

Prompt Inspiration

Via NaPoWriMo

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.

Thanks very much for reading, subscribing, and sharing the stories, poetry, and essays in this space. If you like a story, poem, or essay, please click on the heart. Also if you are so moved, please leave a comment.

Subscribe now

Refer a friend

Today, we’d like to challenge you to write your own erasure/blackout poem. You could use a page from a favorite book, a magazine, what have you. It can be especially fun to play with a book you don’t know, particularly one that deals with an unfamiliar topic. If you’d like to go that route, maybe you’ll find something of interest in the thousands of scanned books at the Internet Archive? Feel free to maintain the whitespace of the original text (as is traditional for erasures/blackouts . . . if anything can be called traditional about them) or to pluck words/phrases from your chosen source material and rearrange them.

Wow! This was difficult! The easiest method for me was printing out the text, finding, and circling phrases that seemed to go together. Then writing out the phrases I had chosen and deleting some words I thought unnecessary.

fresh in your memory,
all your “finds.”

some species exceedingly shy,
obscurely marked,
so alike
it is hard to distinguish.

a few remained enigmas
for years;
provoking glimpses
of some nymph-like bird,
its true place
in the avian system.

the gun has gone out of vogue.
the glass has taken its place.
a hungry rambler
is not an acute observer.

through brier and bush,
through bog,
upon your knees,
even flinging yourself upon the ground
to spy
a wary bird
flitting in the copse.

~~~
Erasure/Blackout Source: Our Bird Comrades, pp. 14–17 (public domain)

Prompt Inspiration

Via NaPoWriMo

Erasure poetry — also known as blackout poetry — is written by taking an existing text and erasing or blacking out individual words. Here’s a great explainer with examples, and you’ll find another here. Some folks have written whole books of erasures/blackouts, including Chase Berggrun’s R E D (which is based on Dracula), Jen Bervin’s Nets (which is based on Shakespeare’s sonnets), and what is one of the grand-daddies of erasures as a form, Ronald Johnson’s Radi Os (which is based on Paradise Lost).

Author’s Note

Three Years In

April 11, 2026

Three years ago this week, I posted for the first time on Substack. I didn’t know if I’d last three months.

I lasted three years. Every week, mostly. And I’m proud of that, genuinely. But I’ve been writing weekly long enough to know when the pace is running ahead of what I actually have to say.

So here’s what’s changing.

At some point this year—fall, most likely—I’ll wind down the weekly schedule. After that, posts will come every two weeks, at first, anyway. That might shift. I’ll tell you when it does.

Part of why: some of you may remember that back in October 2024, I mentioned starting a children’s book, almost as a surprise to myself. That book became five.

It’s a series about a girl named Faith, who spends years being afraid of nearly everything, until a group of girls her age changes that. It grew out of a reunion with women I’ve known since high school, whose friendships came back to me all at once, reminding me what it feels like to be seen. I’m working to get the series published traditionally, and that process is slow and asks for a different kind of attention than weekly posts do. I want to give it what it needs.

I’m not going anywhere. I’m still writing. I just need the work to breathe a little more.

Thank you for reading. Three years of it. That still surprises me.

Upcoming…

• April’s writing prompt:

  One Hundred-Word Wonders, 15 April 2026

  This year, every prompt will come directly from movie titles.

  For those who want a head start, this month’s prompt is: SINNERS. Write in exactly 100 words, a story, poem, or creative non-fiction in any genre, using the prompt. Pieces should be exactly 100 words, no more or less. The 100-word count does not include the title. Hold your piece until the 15th!

Thanks very much for reading, subscribing, and sharing the stories, poetry, and essays in this space. If you like a story, poem, or essay, please click on the heart. Also if you are so moved, please leave a comment.

Subscribe now

Refer a friend

Today, write your own meditation on grief. Try using Brock’s form as the “container” for your poem: a few short stanzas, with a middle section in which a question is repeated with different answers given.

I decided to write a poem about my mother.

Twelve years and a fox still crosses the yard
that way—slow, pausing at the bird feeder,
turning its head like it expects applause.
My first thought: her.

(Who do I tell? No one.
Try again. Who do I tell?
Whoever’s next to me,
which is nobody, which is nobody right now.)

She’d throw her head back, that laugh
came up through her whole chest.
Deer in the yard. Birds at the bath.
Twelve years and they’re still at it.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Prompt Inspiration

Via NaPoWriMo

In his poem, “Goodbye,” Geoffrey Brock describes grief in three short stanzas, the second of which is entirely made up of a rhetorical dialogue.

Thanks very much for reading, subscribing, and sharing the stories, poetry, and essays in this space. If you like a story, poem, or essay, please click on the heart. Also if you are so moved, please leave a comment.

Subscribe now

Refer a friend

Today, try writing your own poem in the voice of an animal or plant, or a poem that describes a specific animal or plant with references to historical events or scientific facts.

I chose to give voice to our cat.

She smelled different by June.
Not wrong, exactly—more like
the inside of a drawer left closed
all summer. I put my nose
to her ear anyway. She let me.
Dogs don’t usually let cats do that.

I knew before she did, maybe
before the vet, before the weekend
she stopped getting up for her bowl.

Something in her chemistry had shifted:
cortisol climbing, the body
reorganizing its priorities.
I read it the way you read a barometer,
not thinking, just knowing.

Those last weeks I slept near her.
Not on her. Cats don’t do that.
At least, not this cat.
But near. The radius got smaller
as she drew into herself—
I mean as her breathing changed.
When it did, I sat up.

Sir David Attenborough says:
let my animal see my dead body.
He knows we understand.

What I understand is this:
she was here, a warmth and a smell
and a kind of permission,
and then the smell went wrong,
and then it left,
and then a room was just a room.

I walked its edges for three days.
Not looking. Checking
what the walls held.
She wasn’t there.

She wasn’t anywhere I could find.

I know what abandoned smells like;
she didn’t smell like that.

Nobody thinks to ask the cat.

Prompt Inspiration

Via NaPoWriMo

Marianne Moore was a well-known modernist poet, with a curious taste in hats. Though she wrote on many themes, I’ve always had some affection for her many poems about – or in the voice of – animals, such as “The Fish,” “Dock Rats,” “The Pangolin,” and “No Swan so Fine.”

Thanks very much for reading, subscribing, and sharing the stories, poetry, and essays in this space. If you like a story, poem, or essay, please click on the heart. Also if you are so moved, please leave a comment.

Subscribe now

Refer a friend

In your poem for today, use a simple phrase repeatedly, and then make statements that invert or contradict that phrase.

I was not the storm
I was the field it crossed
flattened corn
a bent fence post
a dead (drowned?) vole
the dog that wouldn’t come inside

I was not the storm
I was what it left
mud thick as argument
the oak split to its heartwood
a door hanging on one hinge

I was not the storm
I was the sky after
that particular blue
with no mercy in it

I was not the storm
just the year it changed everything
a window left open
water on every floor​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Prompt Inspiration

Via NaPoWriMo

In his poem, “Poet, No Thanks,” Jean D’Amérique repeats the phrase “I wasn’t a poet” multiple times, while describing other things that he instead claims to have been.

Thanks very much for reading, subscribing, and sharing the stories, poetry, and essays in this space. If you like a story, poem, or essay, please click on the heart. Also if you are so moved, please leave a comment.

Subscribe now

Refer a friend