April brings NaPoWriMo, or as I call it, the month when I throw 30 poems down a well.

Actually, the truth is a little more nuanced than that: I’ve found that it’s possible to get poems published even if they’ve appeared on your blog … IF you first check the guidelines for any statement to the contrary and IF you divulge this sort-of previous publication when you submit. (Editors don’t like surprises.)

Anyway … Starting on April 1, you’ll find a new poem here each day, based on the prompts at the link above. If you’re doing NaPoWriMo, too, please let me know in the comments here, and I’ll make sure to include you on my circuit of blog visits.

And if you are a poetry appreciator but don’t consider yourself to be a poet, I highly recommend NaPoWriMo as a way to try your hand at it. The prompts are challenging but approachable. And while you don’t have to blog your results, if you do take that risk, I bet you’ll find that people are supportive. April seems like a time to try something new, doesn’t it?

See you next month — allllll month long.

Crocodilo
suave,
svelte—

un momentito,
crocodilo.

Under

la lune de biscuit,
la luna de biscocho,

una taza de noche
con leche,

café au lait
conmigo,
crocodilo,

café au lait,
crocodilo,
olé.

NaPoWriMo, Day 29 prompt: Write a poem that includes at least five words in another language or languages. I knew I had English, French, and Spanish, but then when I did a final check, I realized I had one more language, too — thanks to a misspelling that I’m leaving in because I like it better that way. Can you spot the word and its language? 

In my blood, I’d go to the men’s room,
the bathroom at Sears, she said.
If pigs had wings, she’d be a streetcar,
she said, and I would have been a bus.

I smile at the Midwestern women. If my aunt
had balls like them, or the pioneer women
crossing the plains, she’d be a bicycle. I would
have been a bus, and we would bottle Paris.

This counterfactual thinking. It is fruitless
to speculate about counterfactual situations.
She’d be my uncle, my aunt; she’d wash
her feet in the sink if we could bottle Paris

and make a ham and cheese sandwich
as respectable Sears matrons flutter
their hands, their support knee-highs,
her feet in the sink. But it is fruitless,

this counterfactual speculation. Fruitless,
my uncle, my aunt, even my grandmother,
though I suspect she has bottled Paris,
wagoned it all the way home.

NaPoWriMo, Day 27 prompt: Take a common expression, do a Google search for its first three words, then skim the first few pages that result, looking for interesting lines and images. I used “If my grandmother had wheels, she’d be a wagon,” which apparently, many people know from a Star Trek movie. The second result was, of all things, a poem by Mohja Kahf, some lines of which I’ve borrowed or adapted here.