Poetry Month Prompts

1. as good as you'll get 2. girl names 3. lacrosse 4. swan 5. house with a name 6. one year after the accident 7. profiteroles 8. potholes 9. vivisection 10. adult revenge 11. "safe" place 12. road sign 13. glam 14. oyster mushroom 15. mother's footsteps 16. what life was like 17. almond milk 18. lagomorph 19. physical therapy 20. birthday flowers 21. book of miracles 22. ferment 23. brick 24. routine 25. days spent waiting 26. infirmary 27. hallucinogen 28. supper club 29. deviant 30. age

4.12.24 | Lately, it's been poetry & seaside excursions, indie bookshops on boats, quiet walks in the park & little free libraries. This evening, we ordered takeout from Much Ado About Pizza & got the Henry the 8th with four kinds of meat, which we then had "Marlowed" (i.e., pan pizza).

"I have been waiting so long for this spring song." - Langston Hughes

Woot woot!! It’s NAPOWRIMO time, babeeeyyy!! Pen a poem everyday for 30 days or browse around and write when you can—the choice is yours. ❤️ I’ve loved making prompt lists over the years and I’m excited to see what this years brings. Be silly! Write some bad poems! Write some okay poems! Enjoy ya’self. Love you. ❤️

instagram: hiitssky

Leila Mottley was regularly writing and performing poetry even before she published her novel Nightcrawling at only nineteen, in 2022; today we get an advance peek into her forthcoming first collection, woke up no light. Divided into hoods—sections on Girlhood, Neighborhood, Falsehood, and Womanhood—the poems instruct us, as here, in the art of noticing, speaking boldly, and feeling deeply.

what to do when you see a Black woman cry 

stop. hum a little / just for some sound / just for a way to fill us up it is streetlamp time / all moon-cheeked black girls are mourning / a wailing kind of undoing don’t mistake this as a tragedy / it is sacred don’t mistake this as a glorious pain / we hurt.

don’t tell me it will be alright. make me a gourmet meal and don’t expect me to do the dishes after don’t try to hug me without asking first if i slept last night / if i need some jasmine tea / and a bath in a tub deep enough to fit my grief

and if i say i want a hug don’t touch my hair while you do it / don’t twist my braids around your fingers or tell me my fro is matted in the back from banging my head on the wall of so many askings

you think we are sobbing for the men, but we are praying for the men / their favorite sweat-soaked t-shirts we are screeching for our thighs for our throats / and our teeth-chipping / for the terror and the ceremony / and the unending always of this sky

so if i let you see a tear drip / if i let you see my teeth chatter know you are witnessing a miracle know you are not entitled to my face crack / head shake / sob but i do not cry in front of just anyone so stop. hum a little / just for some sound / just to fill me up

More on this book and author: 

Learn more about woke up no light by Leila Mottley.

Browse other books by Leila Mottley and follow her on Instagram @leilamottley.

Click here to read Leila Mottley's curated list of recommended books about the San Francisco Bay Area. 

Leila Mottley will be in Brooklyn for a Poetry Night reading and conversation with Tatiana Johnson-Boria at Books Are Magic (Montague Street location) on April 24, 2024 at 7:00 PM. The event will also be livestreamed for free on Youtube. 

Visit our Tumblr to peruse poems, audio recordings, and broadsides in the Knopf poem-a-day series.

To share the poem-a-day experience with friends, pass along this link.

a bit of advice:

order dessert before dinner whenever you can. get the really rich option, the oreo cheesecake or chocolate mouse. lick warm, melty whipped cream off the backside of your spoon, scoop the chocolate clean off the plate, sit back and sigh and lament that you might have not saved enough room for dinner, without an ounce of regret, and then go on to finish the bread and oil and your entire bowl of pasta too. look utterly confused anytime anyone brings up their new diet, or how they need to work out before dinner, or that they are just soooo bloated, or how they just need to lose that last 5 pounds. act as if it is the most absurd thing you have heard that someone would even consider cutting calories or passing on warm cookies fresh out of the oven or ignoring the pleasure of eating a whole bag of pink starbursts in one sitting. picture yourself at age three, often. think about a time before dance classes or diet culture or tiny runway models or tumblr of 2012 got it’s hands on you. remember the way your belly rolls looked extra cute in your purple butterfly swimsuit with watermelon juice covering your sticky salt water fingers, braids wildly unkempt from summertime play (and then remember that nothing has changed with age except that now you have a blue butterfly swimsuit instead of purple). and when you can’t show up for yourself to feed this adult body that has to face the world, feed yourself at three years old, giggly and chubby, sweet talking in hopes for a second popsicle. let them know that they can have three popsicles if they want, and that tonight, we will even order our dessert before dinner.

More Stars Than Sky

I want to understand— all the threads in your bones, how you are both howl and labyrinth, not monster, not grief, but full of longing—

that sadness, tucked deep into your heart, I see it, in glimpses and photographs, in the way you choose your words, in how you are ferociously kind

when you could easily not be. I want to know your clockwork, the puzzle of your heart, if your hands are more map than song, mouth more stars than sky, body more ocean than river—

who are you when it’s quiet? when the days feel too long and not long enough? Who are you when you love, unreasonably and beyond measure?

Give me that— the darkness you keep close, watchful as a wolf, let me see that secret,

and I will keep it safe.

April-National Poetry Month (US)

Love this.

KAT GIORDANO

Poetry Month Prompts

1. Violets 2. Glade 3. Untie 4. Lightning-struck 5. Collegiate 6. Rowing 7. Secret art 8. Labrador 9. Decades before 10. Orion 11. Cleanup site 12. Ripped bag 13. Neanderthal 14. Spring lamb 15. Adventure time  16. Rival team 17. Martian 18. Face like an angel 19. Underwater 20. Hiding place 21. Estate sale 22. Ashore 23. Fountain pen 24. Western 25. Berry pie 26. Various 27. Hazel 28. Jackrabbit 29. Whale-watching 30. High school accident

its just that i hope you know how much fondness and care i carry for you. its all in my hands, its all in my palms, folded. sometimes i read that not-break up letter you wrote me as my own personal knife, that i take it to my chest, my wrists, my arms and legs, letting the reality of it cut through me. maybe if i bleed enough it’ll hurt less.

its as simple as: i love you.

its as complicated as: i love you.

nothing makes sense and yet it does. and i cant help it, i can’t. there’s no cure to this. its you and i cant help but love you so much ill take anything i can get.

it isnt fair to you, and i know i should be thinking of myself, but i feel so selfish for talking to you that its punishable. i cant rid myself of you, i tried. so this is where we are, would you call this standing? i dont know. i dont know anything. thats fine.

i cant let you go and thats the stability you offer, the consistency. i can handle it. its just that… i wonder sometimes. if you feel it too. if you feel that love. if you think about it: about talking about it. about…. about loving me. i wonder if you wonder about it. thats all. i hope you do. and secretly, awfully, i hoped you would be jealous i gave my number to a person who isnt you. i hoped you would because im a terrible person.

i dont know anything except im so in love with you that its become this effortless fondness that i cant express without betraying and revealing myself. its okay. i can hold it back. its okay. i love you and i dont need a thing back. i’d take scraps if thats all i got. thats all im getting.

deep breath. im pathetic. its my own fault. i love you. its my own fault. hopefully you never see this. (if you do, just remember im fragile and i love you. just remember you dont owe me anything but i do love you. just remember we never have to be anything more than what we are, but im so deeply and mundanely in love with you. just dont tell me unless you want to say it back.)

for @nosebleedclub’s prompt i. good as you’ll get

15/30: write a poem from the perspective of a ghost.

schuylerpeck / instagram: hiitssky

Martyr!, the poet Kaveh Akbar’s propulsive debut novel, tells the tale of Cyrus Shams, the son of a lost mother (victim of a 1988 U. S. Naval snafu in the Persian Gulf that killed 290 people on a commercial airliner) and the long-suffering father who emigrated to Fort Wayne, IN with his baby boy. We meet Cyrus as a student of poetry at Keady University and a reformed addict. In this excerpt, he’s at the local open mic with his friends; we also share one of the poems from Cyrus’s bookofmartyrs.docx, helpfully supplied by Akbar, the poet behind the fictional poet.

. .

The Naples Tuesday night open mic had become a mainstay of Cyrus and Zee’s friendship. It was a small affair, not much to distinguish it from the myriad other open mics happening elsewhere in the country—except this was their open mic, their organic community of beautiful weirdos—old hippies singing Pete Seeger, trans kids rapping about liberation, passionate spoken-word performances by nurses and teenagers and teachers and cooks. As with any campus open mic, there was the occasional frat dude coming to play sets of smirky acoustic rap covers and overearnest breakup narratives. But even they were welcome, and mostly it felt like a safe little oasis of amongness in the relative desert of their Indiana college town, a healthy way to spend the time they were no longer using to get drunk or high.   Naturally, Naples didn’t have its own sound equipment, so Zee would usually show up fifteen minutes early with his beat-up Yamaha PA to set up for Sad James, who hosted every week. Sad James was called this to distinguish him from DJ James, a guy who cycled nightly through the campus bars. DJ James was not a particularly interesting artist, but he was well-known enough in the campus community to warrant Sad James’s nominative prefix, which began as a joke but somehow stuck, and to which Sad James had grown accustomed with good humor, even occasionally doing small shows under the name. Sad James was a quiet white guy, long blond hair framing his lightly stubbled face, who played intensely solemn electronic songs, punctuated by sparse circuit-bent blips and bloops, and over time at Keady, he had become one of Zee and Cyrus’s most resilient and trusted friends.   On this night, Cyrus had read a poem early, an older experimental piece from a series where he’d been assigning words to each digit 0–9, then using an Excel document to generate a lyric out of those words as the digits appeared in the Fibonacci sequence: “lips sweat teeth lips spread teeth lips drip deep deep sweat skin,” etc. It was bad, but he loved reading them out loud, the rhythms and repeti­tions and weird little riffs that emerged. Sad James did an older piece where the lyrics “burning with the human stain / she dries up, dust in the rain” were repeated and modulated over molten beeps from an old circuit-bent Game Boy. Zee—a drummer in his free time who idolized J Dilla and John Bonham and Max Roach and Zach Hill in equal measure—hadn’t brought anything of his own to perform that evening, but did have a little bongo to help accompany any acoustic acts who wanted it.   On the patio listening to Cyrus talk about his new project, Zee said, “I could see it being a bunch of different poems in the voices of all your different historical martyr obsessions?” Then to Sad James, Zee added, “Cyrus has been plastering our apartment with these big black-and-white printouts of all their terrifying faces. Bobby Sands in our kitchen, Joan of Arc in our hallway.”   Sad James made his eyes get big.   “I just like having them present,” Cyrus said, slumping into his chair. He didn’t add that he’d been reading about them in the library, his mystic martyrs, that he’d taped a great grid of their grayscale printed faces above his bed, half believing it would work like those tapes that promised to teach you Spanish while you slept, that some­how their lived wisdoms would pass into him as he dreamt. Among the Tank Man, Bobby Sands, Falconetti as Joan of Arc, Cyrus had a picture of his parents’ wedding day. His mother, seated in a sleeved white dress, smiling tightly at the camera while his father, in a tacky gray tux, sat grinning next to her holding her hand. Above their heads, a group of attendees held an ornate white sheet. It was the only picture of his mother he had. Next to his mother, his father beamed, bright in a way that made it seem he was radiating the light himself.   Zee went on: “So you could write a poem where Joan of Arc is like, ‘Wow, this fire is so hot’ or whatever. And then a poem where Hussain is like, ‘Wow, sucks that I wouldn’t kneel.’ You know what I mean?”   Cyrus laughed.   “I tried some of that! But see, that’s where it gets corny. What could I possibly say about the martyrdom of Hussain or Joan of Arc or whoever that hasn’t already been said? Or that’s worth saying?”   Sad James asked who Hussain was and Zee quickly explained the trial in the desert, Hussain’s refusing to kneel and being killed for it.   “You know, Hussain’s head is supposedly still buried in Cairo?” Zee said, smiling. “Cairo, which is in which country again?”   Cyrus rolled his eyes at his friend, who was, as Cyrus liked to remind him when he got too greatest-ancient-civilization-on-earth about things, only half Egyptian.   “Damn,” Sad James said. “I would’ve just kneeled and crossed my fingers behind my back. Who am I trying to impress? Later I could call take-backsies. I’d just say I tripped and landed on my knees or something.”   The three friends laughed. Justine, an open mic regular whose Blonde on Blonde–era pea-coat-and-harmonica-rack Bob Dylan act was a mainstay of the open mic, came outside to ask Zee for a cigarette. He obliged her with an American Spirit Yellow, which she lit around the corner as she began speaking into her cell phone.   In moments like these Cyrus still sometimes felt like asking to bum one too—he’d been a pack-and-a-half-a-day smoker before he got sober, and continued his habit even after he’d kicked everything else. “Quit things in the order they’re killing you,” his sponsor, Gabe, told him once. After a year clean he turned his attention to cigarettes, which he finally managed to kick completely by tapering: from one and a half packs a day to a pack to half a pack to five cigarettes and so on until he was just smoking a single cigarette every few days and then, none at all. He could probably get away with bumming the occasional cigarette now and again, but in his mind he was saving that for something momentous: his final moments lying in the grass dying from a gunshot wound, or walking in slow motion away from a burning building.   “So what are you thinking then? A novel? Or like . . . a poetic mar­tyr field guide?” asked Zee.   “I’m really not sure yet. But my whole life I’ve thought about my mom on that flight, how meaningless her death was. Truly literally like, meaningless. Without meaning. The difference between 290 dead and 289. It’s actuarial. Not even tragic, you know? So was she a martyr? There has to be a definition of the word that can accom­modate her. That’s what I’m after.”

More on this book and author:

Learn more about Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar.

Browse Kaveh Akbar's poetry collections and follow Kaveh on Instagram @kavehakbar.kavehakbar.

Visit our Tumblr to peruse poems, audio recordings, and broadsides in the Knopf poem-a-day series.

To share the poem-a-day experience with friends, pass along this link.

The shooting stars in your black hair in bright formation are flocking where, so straight, so soon? – Come, let me wash it in this big tin basin, battered and shiny like the moon.

Elizabeth Bishop, "The Schampoo" (1955)