National Poetry Month: Prompt 9, from Anuja Ghimire

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You wake up and the world is a buffet of edible flowers. What will you eat? What will you save? What will you gaze at the longest?

Editor’s note: try writing in tercets for a bonus challenge.

Anuja Ghimire is an author of four poetry books: two in Nepali Ankur and Arthaat, and two in English Kathmandu and fable-weavers. Her poems, stories, essays have been anthologized and nominated for Best of the Net and Pushcart prizes, published in Nepal, India, Bangladesh, the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Scotland, and Australia. She works in the e-learning industry. She is an associate editor for Up the Staircase Quarterly, newsletter editor for Nepalese American Chamber of Commerce, and a judge for the annual essay writing contest for school children in DFW, organized by the Nepalese Buddhist Association. She loves conducting creative writing workshops for children in summer camps. She also volunteers for The Great Nepali Diaspora as the lead for the Creative Hub.

National Poetry Month: Prompt 8, from Bridget Gordon

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Write about a person using only descriptive language and imagery about their voice.

Editor’s note: for extra points, write a sonnet.

Bridget Gordon (she/her, fae/faer) is a queer trans woman and emerging poet based in Chicago. A former MFA student and sports journalist, faer poetry is enraptured with queer longing, identity, liminality, and desire. She has past or forthcoming publications in Moist Poetry Journal, TRANS MAG, Pink Poetry Club, and Coin-Operated Press. Fae is the author of the self-published chapbook, the rest is up to you, love, available Summer 2026. Her debut full-length poetry collection, if you know the color of their eyes it’s already too late, will be published by Raging Opossum Press in Fall 2026. Fae lives with her husband, metamour, cats, a blue electric guitar named Evie, and an ominously large TBR pile.

National Poetry Month: Prompt 7, from Tara Shea Burke

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  1. Read the below poem by Judith Barrington, Why Young Girls Like to Ride Bareback, out loud several times to find the rhythm of the poem, noting how the title gives you a specific entry point and physicality to follow, but the word choice, tone and structure, line breaks and all, give us a parallel experience of sensuality, eroticism, and/or young sexual awakening.
  1. Next, write a poem about doing something like washing the dishes, cleaning your car, planting a garden, roller skating, walking alone by the river–anything you know how to do well that you can describe in a similar way as Barrington. The more mundane or ordinary the better! Write into a kind of hyper-description, choosing diction, sounds, line breaks, etc. that create a suggestive parallel experience to the thing you’re describing. For example, how can washing the dishes suggest deep grief?

WHY YOUNG GIRLS LIKE TO RIDE BAREBACK

      by Judith Barrington
 
You grasp a clump of mane in your left hand,
spring up and fall across her back;
then, pulling on the wiry black hair
which cuts into your palm and fourth finger,
haul yourself up till your right leg
swings across the plump cheek of her hindquarters.

Now you hold her, warm and alive, between your thighs.
In summer, wearing shorts, you feel the dander
of her coat, glossy and dusty at the same time,
greasing up the insides of your calves,
and as she walks, each of your knees in turn
feels the muscle bulge out behind her shoulder.

Trotting's a matter of balance. You bounce around
unable to enter her motion as you will when the trot
breaks and she finally waltzes from two to three time.
Nothing to be done at the trot but grab again that mane
that feels, though you don't yet know it, like pubic hair,
and straddle her jolting spine with your seat bones

knowing that when the canter comes, you will suddenly
merge -- you and that great, that powerful friend:
she, bunching up behind, rocking across the fulcrum,
exploding forward on to the leading leg, and you
digging your seat down into the sway of her back,
your whole body singing: we are one, we are one, we are one.

Tara Shea Burke is from Paris, Virginia and teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University and the Visual Arts Center of RVA. Her writing, both poems and short creative nonfiction, is recently published in Moist, Screen Door Review, Shenandoah Literary, Khôra, and Southern Humanities Review. Their creative practice has recently expanded to textiles and sewing, quilting, collage, and lyric prose–both a memoir in essays and spec fic about living in the in between of climate change. Her teaching focuses on the human mind, memory, writing, thinking, and creating as a process, and our experiences in and of the natural world.

National Poetry Month: Prompt 6, from Donna Vorreyer

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Setting Limits


When drafting new work, topical prompts almost never work for me as a writer. If you tell me to write about a time I was surprised, my whole life will suddenly roll out before me like a scripted narrative, no surprises to be found. I work better by giving myself constraints, so today I will offer up one of my favorite options that may help you expand your 30/30 drafting possibilities into new territory.

Number Systems


Write about a topic of your choosing, but give yourself one (or all) of the following numerical
constraints:

● each line must be the same number of words or syllables
● generate a random six digit number and then use that pattern to determine how many
lines will be in each stanza of your draft
● Choose a number that is significant to you in some way – the birthday of your first
love, the phone number of your childhood home – and write a poem where each line
contains the same number of words as each digit. Repeat for multiple stanzas (For
example, a birthdate of 2/18/68 would give you a five line stanza with 2 words, one
word, 8 words, 6 words and 8 words per line.)

Donna Vorreyer is the author of four full-length poetry collections: Unrivered ( 2025), To Everything There Is (2020), Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story (2016) and A House of Many Windows (2013), all from Sundress Publications. Recent work has appeared in Ploughshares, Pleiades, Poet Lore, Colorado Review, Harpur Palate, Baltimore Review, Salamander, and many other journals. Donna lives in the western suburbs of Chicago and runs the online reading series A Hundred Pitchers of Honey. She is the co-founder/co-editor of Asterales: A Journal of Arts & Letters.

National Poetry Month: Prompt 5, from Jessica Coles

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Write a poem about a memory as if you were teaching others to recreate it as something physical: a recipe, a pattern, an instruction manual, etc. Use the terminology of the specific craft or activity (e.g., crochet, woodworking, electronics, car repair). Include materials and tools. Assign it a skill level (novice, intermediate, advanced); would it be useful to have any skills or knowledge before they begin? Give detailed instructions, handy tricks, cautions. Embrace absurdly literal implications.

Jessica Coles (she/her) is a poet and songwriter from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, where she lives with her family and a variety of interesting critters. Her work has appeared in print and online at Moist Poetry Journal, Full Mood Mag, Stone Circle Review, Contemporary Verse 2, The Fiddlehead, Capital City Press Anthology (Vol. 4), Ghost City Review, slips slips, and elsewhere. She has published two chapbooks through Prairie Vixen Press, and her third chapbook, Amphbiography, is forthcoming from Big Pond Rumours Chapbook Press in Summer 2026. 

National Poetry Month: Prompt 4, from J.D. Ho

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Write about a city (or place) that you changed your opinion about.

Note from J.D.: I’ve thought about this a lot as I have gone back and forth through the Bronx while travelling. I always thought of the Bronx as pretty much the worst part of New York, but now whenever I drive through it I feel so happy. The topography and the woods. The architecture. It’s so lovely.

J.D. Ho was born by the sea, raised on a rock, schmoozed in Hollywood, drove to Austin, Texas for an MFA, and now lives among foxes and deer on a sliver of east coast green. J.D.’s work has appeared in Georgia Review, Missouri Review, Ninth Letter, and other journals. J.D. is the author of Backyard Alchemy, a new nonfiction collection from River River Books.

National Poetry Month: Prompt 3, from Jameela F. Dallis

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It’s officially spring and here’s a prompt to help you engage with the colors, sounds, and feelings of the season. I like to call this process (a form of) keyword ekphrasis. 

1. Go outside. Have a journal handy. Create 3 columns. Plan to take 15 minutes to take in the scene.  

2. In one column, spend 3-5 minutes listing all the colors you see or the sounds you hear. You can make quick notes about where you found the colors, or what made the sounds. But no full sentences. 

3. In the second column, spend 3-5 minutes describing what you touch, want to touch, or smell. Stick with short descriptive phrases.

4. Now, circle 2-4 things in each column at random.

5. In the third column, take 3-5 minutes to write a few phrases that bring you back to what you were doing the last spring (these memories don’t have to be things that happened outside). 

6. These are suggestions to help you start writing your poem. Begin with 5 minutes and build in 5-minute segments. Start a line with “Last spring” and bring in a memory from column 3. 

7. Then take one of the colors or sounds you circled in column 1 and end a line with it. Sprinkle in context from your notes as desired. 

8. Start a new line with a circled phrase about sensation or touch from column 2. 

9. Repeat and reverse the steps 6-8. 

10. Take a beat and read what you’ve written. Repeat and build on the process for another 10-15 minutes and you’ll have a draft of a new poem. 

Jameela F. Dallis, Ph.D., lives in Durham, NC. She has poems, arts journalism, and literary scholarship in Feminist Studies, Honey Literary, The Fight and the Fiddle, Our State, Walter, The Bloomsbury Handbook to Toni Morrison, and elsewhere. She’s curated art exhibitions, served in regional curatorial and fellowship committees, taught dozens of university courses, and has facilitated creative workshops for more than a decade. Encounters for the Living and the Dead (River River Books, 2025) is her first book of poetry. Find out more about her work at jameeladallis.com.

National Poetry Month: Prompt 2, from Kevin Philip

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Write a poem about something beautiful in what is seen as ugly, like the calf in Laura Gilpin’s poem “The Two-headed Calf”:

The Two-headed Calf

Tomorrow when the farm boys find this
freak of nature, they will wrap his body
in newspaper and carry him to the museum.
 
But tonight he is alive and in the north
field with his mother. It is a perfect
summer evening: the moon rising over
the orchard, the wind in the grass.
And as he stares into the sky, there
are twice as many stars as usual.

Kevin Philip lives in North Carolina and currently studies AI, Robotics, and Gaming at The University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He enjoys playing the guitar and annoying his dog Polly.

National Poetry Month: Prompt 1, from Angela Heiser

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Write a poem from the point of view of a plant/tree/flower.

How do they experience the world/weather/humans/animals?

Angela Heiser lives near Raleigh and spends her days herding children
and dreaming of her next trip, whether to North Carolina beaches or
Scotland. She writes about exploring nature with her kids and
searching for woodpeckers. She is an alum of Writers in Paradise and
reads for Abode Press, The Poetry Lighthouse, and Wildscape. Find her
on Instagram @angelacheiser

Erasure as Creative Act: A Review of Remi Recchia’s Aphorism  |  Paroxysm (fifth wheel press, 2025) by D.W. Baker

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Aphorism  |  Paroxysm by Remi Recchia (fifth wheel press, 2025). 40 pages. $12

Aphorism  |  Paroxysm by Remi Recchia (fifth wheel press, 2025)

In the opening phrase of “Psalm 111,” an erasure poem titled after its biblical source text, the autobiographical speaker of Aphorism  |  Paroxysm (fifth wheel press, 2025) identifies the chapbook’s personal animating force: “my heart, / upright, // studied.” Author Remi Recchia’s hybrid manuscript, which blends selected free verse compositions with nearly a dozen biblical erasures and over two dozen facsimiles of the transmasc writer’s social media posts from 2022, directly addresses the contested intersection of trans bodies and Christian beliefs. Recchia’s work demonstrates related ideas that transcend poetics and theology: that erasure can be a creative act, and that human creation can be a fulfillment of God’s love.

The decision to reproduce relevant social media posts within the text complicates genre by foregrounding documentary and commentary. Recchia’s 2022 archive includes unabashed statements that lend precise context to his verse, including defining confessions (“The thing about me is I’ll write trans erotica in church and then go out and preach the gospel of Jesus Christ”), self-aware jokes (“As a post-op transmasc, it is simply a Rule that I must wear tank tops whenever it broaches 68° or higher”), and philosophical positions (“Literally the only ‘self-made man’ is a trans man. This is the hill I will die on”). Without the elaboration of an essay or the figuration of verse, many of the character-limited posts might indeed qualify as aphorisms: concise and accessible distillations of truth or sentiment. Instead of attempting to delineate truth from sentiment in a persuasive mode, Recchia’s social media reproductions illuminate and celebrate, affirming the truth of the writer’s authentic perspective.

The levity of Recchia’s posts offers a satisfying complement to the solemn style of his verse. The book’s opening text, “Dead Name” (previously a final selection for the 2021 Best New Poets anthology), is a poignant elegy in tercets that historicizes trans perspectives as more than a passing fad or contemporary symptom. The poem’s epigram identifies “Frank Dubois and other ‘female husbands,’ 1883” as antecedent figures, representatives of a time when “We didn’t have the words” to fully describe trans experiences. Readers are also shown complementing details from Recchia’s own lived experience, such as how “I still turn when I hear my dead / name at the coffee shop, feel etymological / bomb spray shrapnel across the room.” Past and present collide in the poem’s conclusion:

But the only witch now is the hunt I’m dodging
with Frank Dubois. He’s not behind or ahead, he’s with me,
in me, evading this hunt without beagles or guns, French

horn transformed into the echoes of our old names, excess
syllables filling our heads while we strut on the streets
crowded with the girls & deaths we used to look like. 

By linking trans struggles for belonging across disparate frames of history and vocabulary, Recchia advances an understanding of trans identity as a naturally emergent phenomenon, a small but persistent pattern in the variegated fabric of human biology.

A prose poem that substitutes mid-line slashes for line breaks, “Gifts,” explicitly imbues this understanding with a Christian concept of providence, or divine guidance of worldly action. The text sustains its momentum on the anaphoric current of the repeated phrase, “God gave,” interspersed with periodic responses by the speaker. Recchia’s choice of form streamlines the juxtaposition of positive and negative events, such as “God gave me a pet dog / God gave my dog arthritis, twisted joints & inflamed nerve” and “God gave me white spots on the brain / God gave me an MRI.” To this litany of bodily complaints, Recchia adds one that can be read to represent trans identity: “God gave me a body / I said wait it doesn’t fit quite right.” When considered in light of the book’s adjacent social media posts, the overall effect becomes one of interrogation: where do we draw the line between permissibly medical and impermissibly heretical acts of intervention into God-given creation? If accepting God’s providence does not mean embracing complacency, but instead recognizing human action as a constituent element of divine creation, what criteria might we use to discern the Godliness or worthiness of intentions and results?

The book’s erasures of the Bible engage these questions at the level of form. Among the most striking, “Psalm 23,” forges its response using the text of the famous passage which begins, “The Lord is my shepherd,” and details walking through “the valley of the shadow of death.” Recchia selectively erases words from the text to create new verse, a minimalist narrative that connects the traditional “shadow of death” with what can be read as a gender dysphoric experience: “my / want / makes me lie / and / revives / pathways for / shadow death,” claims the speaker, who fears that “my head / is running over / and shall follow me my / for ever.” In contrast to this presentation of misaligned living as a source of pain and suffering, Recchia offers affirmative texts such as “Psalm 84:1–6,” which reads:

How dear to me is
My desire and
my flesh.

The sparrow has found a house
and a nest
by the side of
my God. 

Celebrating the flesh as a house on the side of God, in a text fashioned by erasing scripture, is the poetic complement to another of Recchia’s pointed social media statements: “Trans people are perfect and exactly as God made them (trans).” In this sense, transformative procedures that use excision and creation to save a life from cancerous despair—biopsy, surgery, prosthesis, and more—can be seen as providential acts, or choices of faith that enable God to work through human action.

Aphorism  |  Paroxysm offers a genuine rendition of surprising synthesis, showing readers that the space between queer and Christian communities allows room not only for conventional disagreement, but also for principled alignment. Recchia’s hybrid approach to this task succeeds by channeling a colloquial voice in the American tradition of Whitman: a voice that sings the body electric, in order to illuminate the multitudes contained within the body politic.

Remi Recchia is a Lambda Special Prize-winning poet, essayist, and editor from Kalamazoo, Michigan. A nine-time Pushcart Prize nominee, his work has appeared in World Literature Today, Best New Poets 2021, and Best of the Net 2025, among others. He is the author of two collections of poetry, four poetry chapbooks, two children’s books, and the editor of two contemporary poetry anthologies. Remi has received support from Tin House, PEN America, and the Poetry Foundation. He holds an MFA in poetry and a PhD in English. Remi is currently pursuing an M.Div. at Yale Divinity School, where he serves as poetry editor for LETTERS Journal and lives with his wife, daughter, and two cats.

D.W. Baker is a poet and editor from St. Petersburg, Florida. His poems appear in Identity Theory, fifth wheel press, Sundog Lit, and BRUISER, among others, and have received nominations for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. His reviews appear in Variant Lit, Philly Poetry Chapbook Review, Paraselene, and more. See more of his work at www.dwbakerpoetry.com