MORNING STARTS THE same way it always does: I push through the plastic flap and the outside air hits my face and it’s already warm, late-May warm, the kind that arrives before breakfast and doesn’t apologize. I find my spot on the second shelf. I can see everything from there. The yard. The tree line thick now with leaves. The patio chair where the cushions got left out again.

I wait.

Ollie shows up before I hear him. That’s the thing about Ollie, one second the patio is empty and then it isn’t. He’s just there, sitting on the flagstone like he pays property taxes, grooming his ear with a paw. Dark gray in the morning light. He doesn’t look at me right away. He makes me wait. I hate that I find this interesting.

He comes to the mesh eventually. We do the thing where we press our noses almost to the same spot and breathe. He smells like outside, like cut grass and something dead in the neighbor’s yard, like a life I don’t have and honestly I’m not sure I want. He says something with a low growl that I don't catch and bats at the wire. I bat back. Neither of us catches anything. That’s not the point.

Nobby arrives later, slower, his three legs working through some private calculation the rest of us don’t need to make. He doesn’t do the nose thing. He just finds the lounge chair and settles. Sometimes I watch him sleep and think about the math of it; how he figured out a whole different way to land, to run, to sit. He’s been doing it so long it doesn’t look like a workaround anymore. It just looks like him.

Afternoon. The heat comes down hard through the screen roof and everything slows. Ollie stretches out on the same lounge chair, and Nobby shifts to give him room, and I’m up here on my shelf watching them breathe in and out together, their sides rising, and I think—I don’t know what I think. Something about how the wire is there and it’s fine. I have my shelves. I have my cat door. I go back inside where it’s cool and eat and come back out and they’re still there, just existing, and I sit with them through the mesh and we don’t talk, which is, I’ve found, the best kind of talking.

Evening pulls the light off the yard slowly, slower than it did in March, the sun taking its time. Birds go loud in the trees and then go quiet. Nobby leaves first without ceremony. Ollie stays until the porch light clicks on, then drops off the chair, sits and cleans his front paws and face, and disappears around the corner, into the thicket of butterfly weed. I stay a little longer. I look at where they were. The chair cushion still has the dent from Nobby’s hip. The flagstone holds the day’s heat where Ollie sat cleaning.

I go back inside. I’ll be here tomorrow.

Author’s Note

This one started with my phone camera and two cats who don’t belong to me.

Jake is our indoor cat. He goes outside only through a cat door into a wire-enclosed catio attached to the house—his own small kingdom of shelves and fresh air, safe from everything the yard might throw at him. Somewhere along the way, two neighborhood cats from the same household discovered him. Ollie, a gray tuxedo, and later, Nobby, an orange tabby, who gets around on three legs with a matter-of-factness that still stops me cold. Now they both come regularly, rain or shine, because the catio sits under our covered patio.

The prose poem is Jake’s—his vantage point, his second shelf, his version of what friendship looks like from behind a wire. I gave him a dry interior voice because that felt right. Cats don’t editorialize. They observe, they wait, they come back.

The season matters. Late May into early June, the yard full and warm, the light staying long into the evening; it changes the whole texture of a day.

That’s what I was after, anyway.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Upcoming…

• Two poems about love and memories:

  FLYING, STARTLED, 13 June 2026

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I lie still, thoughts twisting, refusing to settle,  
counting the spaces between heartbeats,  
night stretching wide, restless around me.  

Outside, rain starts—soft, steady,  
a quiet rhythm pressing on the window,  
each drop asking me to let go.  

In dreams, I walk into sheets of rain,  
water folding over skin,  
earth damp beneath bare feet,  
breath mixing with mist,  
a world rinsed clean and new.  

I awake, carrying echoes of dreams,  
rain brushing leaves gently,  
a calm pulse pulling sleep back,  
soft enough to hold my restless mind,  
a steady hum for a night that finally eased.  

Rain 
	keeps 
		falling,  
pulling quiet threads through dawn’s edges,  
each drop tracing the shape of waking.  

I rise slowly,
shadows of wet earth and cool air still with me,  
rain’s memory lingering on my skin,  
a secret held close.  

Light seeps in, pale, soft,  
clouds low and heavy,  
blurring the sharp edges of morning.  

Outside, rain hums a steady rhythm,  
a lullaby stretching past sleep; 
a promise of calm,  
moments held gently between breaths.

Author’s Note

This poem came from those nights when sleep just won’t come, and the mind won’t stop racing. I wanted to capture that restless feeling; how the dark feels too wide, thoughts tangled and loud.

Rain often shows up in those moments for me—not as a fix, but as something steady, a quiet presence that shifts the noise just enough. It’s less about falling asleep and more about finding a small peace inside the chaos.

The poem tries to hold that fragile space between wakefulness and rest, where the world feels both heavy and soft. The rain isn’t just weather here; it’s a kind of gentle company, a rhythm to lean into when the night stretches on too long.

Upcoming…

• A prose poem about what he sees:

  FROM THE SECOND SHELF, 06 June 2026

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Your grandmother’s cheekbones lived in her mother’s
and her mother’s before that;
all the way back to someone
with no name you’ll ever know,
only a posture,
a way of holding the jaw against wind.

The sky over Persepolis
is the same sky.

Words arrived in your mouth
already worn smooth by someone else’s tongue.
You inherited them the way you inherit
a coat too large,
the shape of another body
still pressed into the shoulders.

Somewhere a column stands
cracked at a clean angle,
the burning almost careful.
Three thousand years and the stone
still holds the outline of a hand
that worked it.

The hand means something different now.
Threat. Calculation. Target.

Pride drank first.
Then greed.
The ground hardened the way ground does
when nothing falls on it long enough—
a slow sealing over,
until the animals arrive at the trough
and stand there, stunned,
learning what they no longer have.

Love goes dry before hate arrives.
That’s the order of it.
One side went dry first,
the other answered,
answered,
answered;
and now both have forgotten
what the question was.

The same sky.
Over Persepolis. Over Tehran.
Over the face your face came from.
Over whatever precision
the generals are calling justice tonight.

Something lodges in the sternum;
grief without a name, or older than a name,
a city’s worth of knowing
pressing into bone.

Strangers, the news calls them.
The faces. The words
already in your mouth
before you understand them.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Author’s Note

“Same Sky” took me 82 days to write; 82 days of wrestling with words that kept evading me. Then I read something (two things, actually) that Alexander McCall Smith wrote. The first was his observation that wars begin as a failure of love—that hatred is what moves in when love runs dry. The second was his reminder that ancestry isn’t an abstraction: it lives in cheekbones, in words that arrive in your mouth already worn by other tongues, under a sky that has not changed.

Hüzün (pronounced hoo-zuhn), the Turkish concept of collective melancholy carried by a people and a place, gave those ideas an emotional home. Not personal grief but something older, heavier, shared; the specific weight of inheriting a history you didn’t choose and can’t put down. The poem lives in that concept.

Persia/Iran was already there. It threaded itself in naturally. Three thousand years of civilization, now reduced in the news cycle to a threat, a target, a calculation.

The current Iranian regime is a strict, military-influenced theocratic state that has brutally silenced its own people, thousands killed in the crackdown on protests that began in late 2025, sparked by a collapsing economy and decades of suffocation under clerical rule. The United States encouraged those protesters to rise up, to take back their country, promising that help was coming. Then the bombs fell. The old supreme leader died in the rubble. His son (harder, closer to the Revolutionary Guard, already sanctioned once before) now holds the seat.

What remains is a war that has shape-shifted into economics: sanctions tightening on Iran’s oil, the Strait of Hormuz closed, global energy markets seizing up, a ceasefire that everyone involved seems to distrust. The faces in the streets (the ones who believed the promise) are still there, somewhere underneath all of it.

That is what the poem is reaching toward: the distance between a hand carved in stone three thousand years ago and this, right now. The same sky. The same failure.

Upcoming…

• A poem about nature’s persistence:

  Rain, 30 May 2026

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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:

UNFORGIVEN

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.

Penance

She’d been going to confession for seven months. Same priest, same screen, same Saturday afternoon slot. She told him all of it: the man’s full name, the hotel room, the specific shame of wanting something she had no right to want.

Go in peace, the voice always said.

She was pulling her coat on near the vestibule door when someone said her name.

She turned around.

White collar. The same jaw she had once traced with a finger. That scar just above his collarbone, covered now.

“I requested this parish,” he said, “the week after you stopped returning my calls.“​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Author's Note

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

• The next prompt will drop 17 June 2026.

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

Upcoming…

• A poem about who we become:

  SAME SKY, 23 May 2026

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He kneels on a floor that knows his knees
too well by now, the grooves worn
into wood by decades of asking.
Outside: four wars. Maybe five,
depending on how you count
the ones that don’t make the front page anymore.
He doesn’t know how to hold all of it—
Gaza, Ukraine, Lebanon, Iran, and the others
with their ordinary names
of streets and rivers and border crossings—
so he holds none of it.
Just opens his hands. Empty.
That’s the whole prayer.

His voice doesn’t rise.
It comes out the way old bread breaks,
without drama, just the crumb of a word
landing somewhere below his ribs
and staying.
Peace. He says it.
He says it again.
Even he doesn’t believe repetition will fix anything;
he’s read enough history for that.
But what else?
What else do you do
at five in the morning
when the news has already loaded
and the photographs are already
doing what photographs do?

Once he thought prayer was a bridge.
Now he thinks it’s more like breathing,
not because it changes anything out there,
but because you can’t stop doing it
without dying.
He says peace
and feels it dissolve
before it clears his teeth.
He says it again.

Somewhere a mother is standing
in rubble that used to be a kitchen.
She knows where the window was.
She knows what the light did
at certain hours.
He doesn’t pretend his kneeling reaches her.
He doesn’t pretend anything.
He just keeps saying the word;
worn down to almost nothing,
small and calcium-pale,
doing what a rib bone does:
holding the soft things in.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Author’s Note

A Naomi Shihab Nye line made me pause: “Their prayers were weathered rib bones, small calcium words uttered in sequence.” From her poem “Different Ways to Pray.” I didn’t go looking for it. It found me the way certain lines do, at the wrong moment, which is usually the right one.

I kept turning it over. Calcium words. The idea that prayer could be skeletal—not luminous, not transcendent, just structural. Load-bearing. Something the body makes because it has to, not because it believes it will save anyone.

We are living in a time of multiple wars. I don’t think I need to list them again. Most of us are carrying them in some low-grade, helpless way: reading headlines before we’re fully awake, feeling the inadequacy of whatever we do next. Make coffee. Go to work. Say something, or say nothing.

The priest in this poem isn’t a figure of faith exactly. He’s a figure of persistence. He keeps saying the word peace knowing it dissolves, knowing his knees have worn grooves into the floor and the world hasn’t noticed. That felt true to me; truer than prayer as comfort, prayer as power, prayer as anything more than the stubborn, almost absurd act of not stopping.

Nye’s rib bone did the rest. Ribs hold soft things in. That’s the whole job.​

Upcoming…

• May’s writing prompt:

  One Hundred-Word Wonders, 20 May 2026

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

  For those who want a head start, this month’s prompt is: UNFORGIVEN. 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 20th!

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I STAND AT the window holding a cup of coffee, eyes catching the slow light climbing over the horizon, a soft, steady burn that spills into the sky.

Outside, the crows gather, raucous voices slicing through the quiet, their sharp beaks snatching seeds, jostling each other with feathers and noise, a rough authority of the everyday.

Squirrels bound in, bold and swift, muscling through the chaos, pushing past the crows, claiming their place with flicks of tails and quick feet; no room for arguing here.

Nearby, woodpeckers hammer the suet feeder, their strikes echoing like distant drumming, each one staking a claim, a noisy duel played out in bursts of pecks and calls.

I watch all this—the small battles, the everyday claims to space—then reach for my phone, news breaking through the morning calm, a word that cracks my surface: WAR.

The light shifts, the birds fall silent in my ears, the room feels colder, and the day stretches out, fractured, uncertain, no longer the same morning.

Author’s Note

I wanted to capture a morning that starts with the usual, familiar sounds—the way nature goes on with its small struggles and routines, completely unaware of what’s coming. There’s a messy, noisy life happening just outside the window.

Then the news breaks in, sudden and harsh, pulling me (and anyone in that moment) out of the quiet into something much heavier. It’s about how quickly things can change, how even the most ordinary mornings can be upended by the weight of the world. I tried to hold that tension between normalcy and chaos, without smoothing it over or making it neat.

Upcoming…

• A poem about invoking peace:

  Holding Soft Things, 16 May 2026

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CHARLES LEANED BACK against the rock face; just chillin in a hot spring, up to his chin in clear hot water, buck-naked, legs stretched out.

He released a breath of air, looking up through pristine air at the big pines close at hand and the hardy, gnarly specimens at tree line. The smell of pine and high-country flowering meadow hung in the air. The ridge line of granite peaks and cloudless powder blue skies spread out above.

He felt he had come to terms with the happenings of the past two years. The nighttime tossing and turning and questions with no answers faded away.

He and his wife of three years had divorced and five months later, he lost his job.

He got over the job loss easier than he got over his wife.

At thirty-three, he was on his way up the ladder in an investment firm. He was in sales. He wasn’t crazy about his job; but he was making good money and the company was growing.

He could plan for a family and their future.

His job was time-consuming. It cost him his wife.

Something had changed. They drifted apart. She divorced him. He was crushed. He dove into his work. It helped him deal with it.

He scored on a couple of deals that brought him a substantial commission.

A larger firm bought the company; new management changed things around, and he liked the job even less. He took a generous severance package.

He didn’t know what he would do. But whatever it was, it didn’t need to be in a hurry. With a close eye on things, he could live comfortably for a long time.

With a cool breeze on his face from the snowmelt stream that runs alongside and into the hot spring, he felt free from the past.

The past was gone but not forgotten.

He got things done at his own pace.

At first, he traveled. Time to do it while he could, he thought. He went to Hawaii; beautiful, he could live there. And Alaska, beautiful, would in no way live there by choice. He was always cold.

He started camping again, something his family did when he was younger. A forgotten joy remembered.

Now he was camped in a meadow next to Berry Hill Lake at about 6000’ on a spur trail just off the Pacific Crest Trail. Near Markleeville, south of Lake Tahoe.

Up on the ridgeline coming in, half a mile back, the Sierra Mountains stretch out north and south, down to the long central valley on one side, and to the high plains arid desert on the other.

Entering his second night, he had seen no one. Not surprising. This was a little-known hot spring in an area of many.

He thought about doing extended trips on the PCT. Hikers do the whole thing, Mexico to Canada. It can take months.

He’d kept in touch with his friends and previous contacts.

A couple of his business friends wanted him to join them. They sold partnerships and stock shares for a company called Thorium NRG. It made Thorium-based modular nuclear power stations sized to run small businesses up to industrial complexes. Expandable as needed.

Opinions of and regulations for the use of these reactors were changing. The future needs more energy. AI, by itself, demands huge amounts of energy. These modules would do the trick. Thorium is cheaper and less toxic.

It was just a matter of time. Get in, he thought.

He joined up and was to start on Monday. He’d work out of his place in South Lake Tahoe. They were in San Francisco and L.A.

He knew he wanted to find “her” and to have a family, but that day was in the future. Something pleasant to think about, always in the back of his mind.

For now, he’d go with the opportunity at hand.

He followed a jet and its contrail across the sky as it tracked eastward. It disappeared beyond the ridge right where the trail begins its descent down the mountain slope to the lake.

Someone wearing a lime green jacket was coming down the trail.

A female wearing a backpack.

A hundred yards out, she stopped and gave a wave. He waved back and watched as she wove her way down the talus and boulders.

She walked along the shoreline and selected a place to camp.

She set things up with ease.

She was shapely.

Pulling a towel out of her pack, she angled over to the creek and made her way up the short distance to the spring.

Only then did he think about being naked, and it was too late anyway.

He was only a little self-conscious.

She was pretty.

He could only smile as she came up to the spring. She eyed him, looked around, and saw his clothes laid out on the rock shelf.

She smiled.

“I hope I haven’t intruded on you,” she said.

“No, no. I’m surprised that’s all. Not many people know about this spot.

“You know you aren’t on the PCT now, right? There’s no through trail here.”

“Oh, I know,” she said. “We used to come here as kids.”

Looking into the spring, she said, “Someone stacked the river rock into a nice tub. Real nice.”

“Um, that would be me. I’ve been working on it.”

“I’m Maria. You don’t mind if I get in, do you?”

She began stripping down.

Somewhat surprised and stumbling over his words he answered her, “Hi, Maria, - I’m Charles, - - Nice to see you, I mean meet you. - Uh, no, sure, of course. Come on in. The water’s fine.”

The back of his mind spoke up. - “Charles. Meet your future.”

Heat rises the way relief does—
slow, then all at once.
	You can lose two years
to the same ceiling.
	You can lose a woman
to the particular silence
that grows between people
who stopped saying the hard thing.

	Out here, granite doesn’t care.
	Pine doesn’t care.
Sky, least of all.
	That’s the whole point.

He built something with his hands
for no reason,
which is the only good reason.

Then the mountain
sent someone down.
	It does that sometimes—
	waits until you’ve quit asking
and tosses you
an answer
in a lime green jacket.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Author’s Note

The story came first—Charles, a hot spring, a lime green jacket appearing on the trail at exactly the right moment. It’s a quiet piece, more interested in the interior weather of a man sorting himself out than in plot, and it earns its ending without forcing it.

The poem wasn’t meant to retell any of that. I wanted to write something complementary, which turned out to mean feeling rather than mirroring—the emotional current running beneath the story’s surface, pulled up and held to the light on its own terms. Solitude as chosen, not merely suffered. The strange logic of building something for no reason. The way clarity tends to arrive only after you’ve stopped chasing it.

Two forms, one set of truths. The story shows you, Charles. My poem tries to show you what it feels like to be him.​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Upcoming…

• A prose poem about an ordinary morning:

  Morning Breaks, 09 May 2026

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Today, try writing your own poem that discusses a real or mythical being or profession (demons, firefighters, demonic firefighters) with the same sort of musing yet dispassionate tone.

My first instinct was a unicorn. Then a mermaid. Both felt too familiar—creatures so often reimagined they’ve lost whatever strangeness they started with. So I went looking for something less common and found the qilin, a creature from Chinese mythology that appears only at the birth or death of a great sage or ruler. I learned that because it exists only in relation to greatness, and greatness has grown scarce, the qilin is rarely seen anymore (not extinct, exactly) just waiting for an occasion that keeps failing to arrive. That felt like the right creature for this challenge.

They appear only for the great men, which is to say
rarely now. The last confirmed sighting
was four or five centuries ago, give or take.

They do not bend grass. Whether the grass
cares about this is not known.

Their scales are probably green, or gold;
it depends on the dynasty.
The horn is sometimes there and sometimes not.
The scholars do not agree,
but they agree about very little.

They eat nothing living. Perhaps nothing at all.
Perhaps they are simply not hungry.

When a sage is born, a qilin comes.
When one dies, it comes again.
Between these occasions it is somewhere
unrecorded.

. . . Their sound is like bells
in a room you have just left.
No one is in that room anymore.

Here is a video with more information about this mythical creature.

Prompt Inspiration

Via NaPoWriMo

In his poem, “Angels,” Russell Edson speaks of these spiritual warrior-messenger-guardians as if they were a type of endangered animal. Brief as it is, the poem is disorienting in its use of flattened diction, odd similes, and elliptical statements.

Upcoming…

• A story by James Ron with a complementary poem:

  IN A HOT SPRING, 2 May 2026

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In your poem today, similarly compare your everyday present life with your past self, using specific details to conjure aspects of your past and present in the reader’s mind.

Three facilities. Three voicemails.
Forms across the kitchen counter,
edges gone soft from handling.
Late April in Maryland, which means
a cardinal, fighting with his reflection.
My sister is forgetting to eat.
In Cayman, I walked into water
so clear you could count fish
around your ankles. Sand
that hurt to look at, even through the sea.
Small fish came and went,
knocking against my legs;
curious, or just hungry, I never knew which.
Water warm. I could have stood there
for as long as I wanted.
I had no idea.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Prompt Inspiration

Via NaPoWriMo

In “After Turning the Clocks Back,” Jennifer Moxley links present with past, using a few well-placed details to invoke both a sense of the daily “now” and a nostalgic sense of the speaker’s long-ago life.

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Today, try writing a poem that follows the same beats: three sentences, six lines: statement, question, conclusion.

There is a grocery list in my mother’s handwriting
still asking for coconut milk.
How do the dead keep making requests
of the living?
We call it memory but mean
we haven’t learned to say no.

Prompt Inspiration

Via NaPoWriMo

Victoria Chang’s poem, “The Lovers,” is short and somewhat shocking, bringing us quickly from a near-hallucinatory descriptive statement to a strange sort of question, before ending on the very direct statement of a “truth.” Six lines, three sentences, and to top it off, a title that I think works for the poem but is only obliquely related to its text.

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Write your own poem in which all the verses contain the same number of lines (whether couplets, triplets, quatrains, etc.) and in which you give the reader instructions of some kind.

Fresh water in his bowls. He drinks
from the left side of the bowl in the kitchen,
like something’s written there.

Feed him around eight. If you’re late,
he’ll sit at the kitchen counter
and look through you, not at you.

Dry food in the silver bowl.
You’ll think the white one is the same.
He’ll tell you otherwise.

When he goes missing, look under
the bed in the purple room. He stays there
until the house feels right again.

He’ll sleep at the end of the bed.
Let him. He wants the weight
of someone sleeping near.

You can go to him. You can wait.
Sit in the same room, read.
He’ll come when he’s ready.

Call me if he won’t eat, two days running.
Otherwise, trust yourself. You’ve known him
almost as long as I have.

We’ll be in a walled city
of towers we first climbed twenty years ago,
still counting each other’s steps.

Think of us there. More likely, though,
Jake will keep you too busy.
He knows how to need.

Prompt Inspiration

Via NaPoWriMo

Read Robert Fillman’s poem, “There should always be two.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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