NaPoWriMo 2026 closes today with an optional prompt asking for a poem about a mythical being or profession, written in a musing yet dispassionate tone — curious, analytical, slightly detached, like a researcher observing a subject rather than a participant in the action. Russell Edson’s Angels as the model: flattened diction, odd similes, elliptical movement.

I spent the day searching.

I went looking through Greek and Roman mythology for a deity who carries something recognizably queer — non-binary, fluid, refusing fixed form — and who actually mattered, held weight, played a central role rather than a footnote. I expected to work hard and find something partial. What I found instead stopped me: a deity who sits at the very root of freedom itself, in several of its oldest and most distinct forms. A deity the ancient world already understood as androgynos. A deity who dies more than once and keeps returning as something larger.

The astonishment came in layers. First the figure. Then the entanglement — how deep the roots run, how many names the same force carries across Greek and Roman tradition, how the whole constellation of freedom clusters around this one center. Understanding that entanglement and finding the form occupied me today.

A triptych emerged. Two parallel mythologies narrated beside each other — the same story, different light — and a third poem receiving what both hand forward into now. The form performs the argument: plurality, the same force seen through different eyes, both true simultaneously.

Dionysus. Bacchus. Liberation.

Constellation Into Freedom
A Triptych

I. Dionysus
Dionysus arrives more than once.
The first time as Zagreus, son of Zeus and Persephone,
which is already complicated.
The Titans come for him — Hera sends them —
and they unmake him.
Athena rescues the heart.
This is how hearts survive: someone holds them.

The heart finds its way to Semele,
a mortal woman in Thebes
who carries Zeus's child and asks, somehow,
to see the god as he actually is.
He shows himself.
She burns.
Zeus lifts the unborn child from the fire
and finishes the growing in his own thigh.

The third birth.
Born of Persephone. Born of Semele. Born of a thigh.
Each time he emerges with less certainty
about which shore he belongs to.

He presents as soft.
Long hair, adorned — what they called androgynos —
the body claiming both shores at once.
Women follow him up the mountain at night
and keep their own counsel in the morning.
He governs the mask, the theater,
the art of becoming other,
which turns out to be sacred.

Ariadne gives Theseus the thread
so he finds his way out of the labyrinth.
Theseus takes the thread and leaves her on an island.
Dionysus finds her there.
He knows something about difficult places
and surviving into something larger.
He marries her.
Her crown rises into the northern sky.

Constellation Into Freedom
A Triptych

II. Bacchus

Bacchus arrives more than once.
The first time as a child of Jupiter and Proserpina,
which is already complicated.
The Titans come for him — Juno sends them —
and they unmake him.
Minerva rescues the heart.
This is how hearts survive: someone holds them.

The heart finds its way to Semele,
a mortal woman in Thebes
who carries Jupiter's child and asks, somehow,
to see the god as he actually is.
He shows himself.
She burns.
Jupiter lifts the unborn child from the fire
and finishes the growing in his own thigh.

The third birth.
Each time he emerges with less certainty
about which shore he belongs to.

They call him Bacchus. Also Liber. The Free One.
He presents as soft.
Long hair, adorned, the body claiming both shores at once.
Women enter the Bacchanalia first —
then everyone, five times a month,
the secret gathering where tongues loosen,
where conspirators speak freely,
where the ordinary grow large enough
to frighten the Senate into silence.
This is how you measure a god's power:
by what the powerful move to silence.

Ceres stands beside him —
grain, law, sustenance,
the Aventine hill where ordinary people
stored their rights alongside their grain.
Ceres Legifera. The law-bringer.
Freedom needs a field to stand in.
Without bread there is no freedom.

And Libera stands beside him —
the free one, feminine —
later Proserpina, later Ariadne,
the name traveling across women
who descend and return
and descend and return
and each time surface
holding something new.

Libera marries Liber.
Venus places the crown in the northern sky.

Constellation Into Freedom
A Triptych

III. Liberation

Corona Borealis still turns overhead.
You can see it tonight if you look north.
A crown made of stars
from a wedding between a multiply-born god
and a woman left on an island
who became the free one.

This is what they left us:

Freedom needs roots.
Bread. Law. Field. Grain.
The rule holding the vine upright.

And freedom needs the spilling over.
The wine. The mountain at night.
The body claiming both shores at once.
The self unmade
and somehow the heart survives
and someone holds it
and it begins again.

People who live hidden
already know descent.
They know Persephone's corridor,
the long season underground,
the patience of the return.

They know the labyrinth.
They carry the thread.
They find their way out
into open air
and sometimes never learn
who left the thread there for them.

Three births. Three names. Three chances
to arrive as what he actually was.
The mask revealing more than the face.
The god who governs becoming other —
which turns out to be
the oldest form of freedom.

Bread grounds it.
Wine loosens it.
Law holds it.
The thread guides it.
The underworld transforms it.
The crown remembers it.

And it turns in the northern sky
every night
for anyone who looks up.

And as always, thank you so much for reading.

Wild Lion*esses Lookout is a working studio—a space for creative work, vision, and collaboration.

Here, I share poetry, photography, digital art, and design—alongside professional support in editing, ghostwriting, authenticity reads, and consulting. This is a grounded space shaped by lived experience, artistic skill, and care. If this work resonates, consider becoming a paid subscriber for $10/month. You can see what I offer paid subscribers and founding members on my About page

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NaPoWriMo Day 24 asked to gave us Mandakranta Sen and her poem, “The Flying Nightdress,” where she describes something fantastical and strange that occurs while the rest of the world is asleep. Today, the challenge is to write a poem that takes place at night, and describes something magical or strange that happens but that no one is awake (or around) to notice.

Night Work

Three in the morning, the world forgets to watch.

I slip through the seam the dark makes
 between what is and what the light allows—
 a Queen, ungoverned, unnamed,
 landing in airports the sleep-lists miss.

I carry forty languages like keys.
 I find the warlords in their dream-dark rooms
 and speak to each in his own mother-tongue,
 and something old wakes in them—first meal, first song—
 and they lay the weight down.

I reach Lusaka before dawn
 and the children scatter home safe
 and smoke dissolves into the orange sky.
 I locate the clinic,
 speak the formula the doctors need,
 and the immune cells hold.

I board the midnight train for Johannesburg
 and when I step off, the pass laws
 fall from men's hands like old skin
 and the courthouses crumble
 into the morning dew.

I walk Bahnhof Zoo at 2 a.m.
 and the hunger—raw, specific—
 recognizes me and loosens its grip.
 I hand the kids their futures back.

I travel to the Dakota silos
 and the launch codes dissolve
 like frost on the Leine before sunrise.
 I take tea with the general
 and he laughs about his grandchildren
 and forgets the orders folded in his pocket.

The clubs arcing above the students
 land now as gentle hands
 on a sleeping child's back.

And all of this I do
 while the waking world sleeps its certain sleep,
 convinced the morning repeats itself.

It does. And it arrives lighter.

I slip back through the seam
 before the first alarm sounds,
 before the sparrows remember to begin—

and sleep a sleep
the waking world walks past:

the deepest kind,
 the sleep of the one who ran the proof every night
 and crossed the threshold every morning
 carrying the knowledge, hidden yet real—

solvable.
 
Always, still, solvable.

And as always, thank you so much for reading.

Wild Lion*esses Lookout is a working studio—a space for creative work, vision, and collaboration.

Here, I share poetry, photography, digital art, and design—alongside professional support in editing, ghostwriting, authenticity reads, and consulting. This is a grounded space shaped by lived experience, artistic skill, and care. If this work resonates, consider becoming a paid subscriber for $10/month. You can see what I offer paid subscribers and founding members on my About page

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For NaPoWriMo Day 23, the prompt invited us to try a villanelle inspired by Kiki Petrosino’s loose villanelle, “Nursery.”, with the poem ending on a question.

Repetition, ritual, and a touch of obsession felt built for one particular subject in this house: our morning waking ceremony. Each dawn begins with shifting borders, offered tribute, royal demands, sudden teeth, and deep confusion about who wronged whom. Sir Montgomery was ready for the form.

Morning Audience with Sir Montgomery

By dawn I claimed the room my body needs.
They entered night with dreams of equal laws.
Why does my human shout when love gets claws?

I turned through dreams and stretched with practiced ease,
then laid my length where warm sleep gently draws.
By dawn I claimed the room my body needs.

At last they woke and offered up their hand,
I pressed it first to cheeks and brow and jaws.
Why does my human shout when love gets claws?

I purred to guide the service into grace,
through whisker roots and ears of noble cause.
By dawn I claimed the room my body needs.

Then in their hand a lively twitch arose.
I caught it fast and held it in my paws.
Why does my human shout when love gets claws?

They cried their “OUCH!” and stirred the morning hush.
I loosed my grip and judged their manners’ flaws.
By dawn I claimed the room my body needs.
Why does my human shout when love gets claws?

And as always, thank you so much for reading.

Wild Lion*esses Lookout is a working studio—a space for creative work, vision, and collaboration.

Here, I share poetry, photography, digital art, and design—alongside professional support in editing, ghostwriting, authenticity reads, and consulting. This is a grounded space shaped by lived experience, artistic skill, and care. If this work resonates, consider becoming a paid subscriber for $10/month. You can see what I offer paid subscribers and founding members on my About page

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I sat with it a long time.

Nicknames and I share a complicated history — complicated being the polite word for it. I explored several directions today, none of them fitting, each one landing slightly wrong, until I understood why.

I considered writing about Sir Montgomery. Monty. Mausi. Monty-Mausi. Monterich. Monte. The full ceremonial range. I decided against it — partly out of respect, partly because I genuinely prefer not knowing what he thinks about any of them, especially the ones involving the rattle of the kibble bag.

So I went where the prompt actually pulled me.

Into the early years. Into the place where I wore names most often as wrong uniforms — stretched into danger signals, fired at me as mockery, assigned over a person who matched nothing on any available map. That person was me. I matched nothing.

I pay close attention to the language I reach for and try to avoid violent words and violence whenever possible. Today the truth of the experience overruled the intention. The language chose itself.

Someday I may write the other poem — the one about who I am now, the name I carry today, the vast canyon of it. No nicknames worth exploring there. Only the three letters that finally fit.

Today belongs to the battlefield.

The Battle for Visibility

First syllable —
  the body deployed
  before the mouth finished loading.

Perimeter secured.
  Sightlines clear.
  Incoming.

The name arrived as uniform —
  wrong rank,
  wrong regiment,
  wrong war entirely.
  She wore it anyway.
  Reported for duty.

When she held her ground
  the pack flanked her.
  Chimpanzee.
  Pig.
  They fired what they had.

She returned every round.

They seized the territory,
  left her no foxhole,
  no coordinates,
  no position on any map.

She dug in.

Invisible.
Still firing.
Still there.

And as always, thank you so much for reading.

Wild Lion*esses Lookout is a working studio—a space for creative work, vision, and collaboration.

Here, I share poetry, photography, digital art, and design—alongside professional support in editing, ghostwriting, authenticity reads, and consulting. This is a grounded space shaped by lived experience, artistic skill, and care. If this work resonates, consider becoming a paid subscriber for $10/month. You can see what I offer paid subscribers and founding members on my About page

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This poem grew from Day Twenty of Na/GloPoWriMo, which asked participants to write a single‑sentence poem using a mythical animal as a metaphor for some aspect of a contemporary person’s life, and to include one spoken phrase.

The griffin—a creature who in some traditions mates for life—became a way to gather my own life into one long line: the lion‑ground of Germany, the eagle‑sky of the United States, the first‑and‑only kiss of 1997, and the grief of 2020, all circling and pacing in the space where “I have never been one chair, only the space where several kinds of dignity meet.”

The Griffin

The griffin, part‑lion and part‑eagle, 
who never chose another partner 
after the first one died, 

paces between German law’s thick walls and American sky, 
circling the difference between “I must be seen” and “I must be free,” 
then climbs into the sky 
to see the map, 

kneels in the dirt to redraw it, turns chaos into paths and paths into practices, 
until the bird’s‑eye clarity can finally land and say, 

“I have never been one chair, 
only the space where several kinds of dignity meet,” 

and steps back into the life 
they’ve redrawn, 
four paws on the ground, 
two wings ready to rise every time 
the fog of Wischi‑Waschi 
tries to claim them again.

And as always, thank you so much for reading.

Wild Lion*esses Lookout is a working studio—a space for creative work, vision, and collaboration.

Here, I share poetry, photography, digital art, and design—alongside professional support in editing, ghostwriting, authenticity reads, and consulting. This is a grounded space shaped by lived experience, artistic skill, and care. If this work resonates, consider becoming a paid subscriber for $10/month. You can see what I offer paid subscribers and founding members on my About page

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Today’s NaPoWriMo prompt sent me to Kate Greenaway’s Language of Flowers — pick a flower, play with its name, its sound, its meaning, its history, its healing or its harm.

Four flowers answered. I gave them the floor.

Flower Bed

Anemone. Wind-daughter. Forsaken.
Tissue-pink above a furry green globe.
Protoanemonin — blisters where touched.
Adonis bled the red cousin into being.
Called Japanese. Shipped from China.
Sedative in drops. In handfuls, poison.

Somniferum. Sleep-bearer.
Salmon crinkle, purple-black blotch.
Hul gil — Sumerian joy plant, 3400 BCE.
Pap — the porridge nurses stirred to quiet.
Papaver. Demeter's grief-flower.
Baker's seed and dreamer's milk.
Morphine, codeine, thebaine.
Consolation. Oblivion. One stem.

Rudbeckia hirta. Hairy Rudbeck.
Golden ray, near-black dome.
Justice. The eye holding from gold.
John Gay's Susan, 1720 — sailor's farewell.
Echinacea kin. Blood-warming.
Named for a man.
Renamed for a woman at the sea-line.

Phlox paniculata. Greek flame.
Magenta, clove-breath, dusk.
Moths before morning.
Cherokee root-wash, blood-moving.
Unanimity. Hearts united.
Many mouths. One scent.

And as always, thank you so much for reading.

Wild Lion*esses Lookout is a working studio—a space for creative work, vision, and collaboration.

Here, I share poetry, photography, digital art, and design—alongside professional support in editing, ghostwriting, authenticity reads, and consulting. This is a grounded space shaped by lived experience, artistic skill, and care. If this work resonates, consider becoming a paid subscriber for $10/month. You can see what I offer paid subscribers and founding members on my About page

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The Grand Scandal at the Palace of Managed Sentiment

In the Kingdom of Correct, where the chandeliers gleam
  With the light of a thousand approved points of view,
  Lord Percival mounted the podium to dream:
“Let the Outrage begin! (At a pace that is paced!)”

The Duchess of Triggers swept onto the floor,
  Her gown made entirely of signed petitions —
  She’d cancelled eleven by half past four
  And filed fourteen more formal requisitions.

  “A transgression!” she shrieked, and the music went dead.
  “Lord Aldous has uttered a Problematic View!”
  “I merely observed,” said Lord Aldous, bright red,
  “That the system absorbs what the system works through!”

The Grand Valve — that golden, magnificent thing
  Set gleaming in marble above the main hall —
  Released its beloved and familiar ring:
  It hissed. And it whistled. And swallowed it all.

Yet then — through the doors stepped a figure in white,
  A Lion to the left, a Lamb to the right,
  The Universe balanced on top, Card Twenty-One,
  The Fool underneath it, Card Zero — begun.

The Fool bowed.

         Pulled from Lord Percival’s sash — a mirror.
         Percival saw Lord Percival seeing himself be seen.
         
         Pulled from the Duchess’s stack of petitions — her face,
         a mask she had worn since the age of thirteen.

         Juggled three gilded invitations, a gavel, a crown —
           let them hang in the air just a breath past the possible —
           caught the crown, placed it gently back upside down,
           and smiled at the audience: perfectly logical.

         Reached into the Grand Valve’s magnificent throat
           and drew out — still warm — seventeen cancelled careers,
           four movements absorbed, one extremely fine quote,
           and a whale nobody mentioned in forty-three years.

         Laid them down on the parquet.
         Said nothing.

The Lion yawned at the chandeliers.
The Lamb grazed the carefully managed silence.

The theater looked at the theater.

The Grand Valve swiveled,
  searched for the pressure to helpfully release,

found its own workings
spread across the floor like a clock a child opened —

and had absolutely nowhere
to put any of it.

And as always, thank you so much for reading.

Wild Lion*esses Lookout is a working studio—a space for creative work, vision, and collaboration.

Here, I share poetry, photography, digital art, and design—alongside professional support in editing, ghostwriting, authenticity reads, and consulting. This is a grounded space shaped by lived experience, artistic skill, and care. If this work resonates, consider becoming a paid subscriber for $10/month. You can see what I offer paid subscribers and founding members on my About page

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Thank you. 🏳️‍🌈❤️😻

NaPoWriMo Day 17 — After Hallelujah in the Streets

Today’s prompt asks me to respond to a favorite poem by another poet.

I went straight to .

Regular readers here know Gloria — investigative journalist, Substacker, guardian of uncomfortable truths about the Tyler Robinson/Charlie Kirk shooting case in her series 430 Feet. On April 22, 2025, she published Hallelujah in the Streets — twelve stanzas borrowing Leonard Cohen’s architecture and filling it with tear gas, gavels, trans erasure, ICE custody deaths, and ten million strangers who refuse to go home. The next day I answered with Do Not Say You Didn’t Know — my German witness poem, the one born from growing up in the aftermath of obedience. Gloria saw it. We talked across the comments. The conversation stayed open.

Now a year later, America has moved further into the dark she named. Two assassinations. More deaths in ICE custody. States actively erasing trans people from their own records. What she called forgetting turns out to be policy.

So today I answer her again — her craft, her relentlessness, her act of borrowing as resistance. From across the water. From a country that knows this smell.

SHE WHO STIRS THE STORM

HALLELUJAH IN THE STREETS

Listen, People—my People…

Read more

a year ago · 172 likes · 106 comments · Gloria Horton-Young

For Gloria Horton-Young — and Leonard, who built the ladder.

AFTER HALLELUJAH IN THE STREETS

 I read you in one breath—
  twelve stanzas, breathless,
  the way you march your readers
  through tear gas and gavel-fall
  until Hallelujah
  scalds the throat like truth.

You knew what you were doing
 when you borrowed Leonard's broken word—
 the syllable
 he'd spent a lifetime
 pulling inside out,
 and handed it back
 to the street.

He built a ladder from a chord
 and you climbed it
 with ten million strangers.

Gloria, I watched you
 take the sacred
 and make it common—
 which is what the sacred always wanted.

You kept the architecture—
 the turn, the counter-turn, the cry—
 and filled it
 with the bodies
 democracy requires
 and keeps disappearing.

This is what poets do
 when institutions fail:
 they return language
 to the ones
 the law just tried to silence.

You wrote the stanza
 the courts keep striking down.
 You filed it in the square,
 In tear-streaked air,
 in the choir forming
 wherever enough people
 refuse to go home.

Leonard passed you the chord.
 You passed it to the street.
 I carry it back across the water
 from a country that rebuilt
 word by word
 after the silence—

and knows: a word travels
 as long as one voice
 keeps throwing it forward.

Hallelujah.

And as always, thank you so much for reading.

Wild Lion*esses Lookout is a working studio—a space for creative work, vision, and collaboration.

Here, I share poetry, photography, digital art, and design—alongside professional support in editing, ghostwriting, authenticity reads, and consulting. This is a grounded space shaped by lived experience, artistic skill, and care. If this work resonates, consider becoming a paid subscriber for $10/month. You can see what I offer paid subscribers and founding members on my About page

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Day 16 of NaPoWriMo 2026 asks for a poem in the spirit of Ocean—something silent, something enduring, something that teaches through presence rather than speech.

A year ago, I wrote A Poetic Journey Through Captivity, moving through locks, chains, doors, keys—mapping a life shaped by what closed, what held, what slowly opened. That piece stayed with the long arc of captivity and release.

Wild Lion*esses Pride by Jay

A poetic journey through captivity, discovery, and liberation.

1 | Locks There were no keys. Only locks, only chains, only doors that shut behind me and did not open again. I lived in dungeons of silence, prisons of duty, forced labor disguised as purpose, house arrest mistaken for home. I was shackled by expectation, by words spoken in command, by the weight of others’ wants pressed into my spine until I forgot I could stand upright. Codependency wrapped its coils around me, a leash, a collar, a cage. Not held in love, but in obligation. I was told this was normal. I was told this was right. I did not question it— not at first. And so, I carried my captivity as if it belonged to me. I did not know there were doors to open. I did not know that I had been locked away. I only knew that I was alone…

Listen now

a year ago · 31 likes · 27 comments · Wild Lion*esses Pride by Jay

Today, the scale narrows. Two keys remain. Metal in my hand. Weight, timing, choice.

They do what Jeffers trusted poetry to do: they point straight at the real and let it speak through contact.

This poem listens there.

Two Keys

I hold the last two keys and they start the lesson before I speak.
I lift the car key and feel eight months settle into my hand,
 a quiet stretch where wheels stood still,
 battery drained,
 plans paused in the driveway like a sentence held mid-breath.
 I wait with it.
 I count coins, delay repairs, walk past it day after day.
 It teaches pace.
 It teaches trust in return.
 Movement gathers, then arrives.
 This week I turn it again.
 The engine answers.
 The road opens.
 Timing lands when it lands.

Heavier.
 Rooms hang from it.
 Shelves, drawers, stacks of things I sorted, weighed, chose.
 I weigh each object, choose its path,
 stay, store, leave.
 Each choice shapes space around me.
 Each pause fills the rooms with a different air.
 This key carries walls and years and small acts of care.
 It teaches measure.
 It teaches release through the hand.
 I walk through each room and feel the shift grow.
 Space loosens.
 I loosen.

I stand between ignition and doorway,
 two metals, two stories, one body.

They hold time steady.
 They carry silence and weight.
 They show me how change moves.
 Slow.
 Exact.
 Earned.

I close the door.
 I lock.
 I turn again.
 I step back.

I move.

And as always, thank you so much for reading.

Wild Lion*esses Lookout is a working studio—a space for creative work, vision, and collaboration.

Here, I share poetry, photography, digital art, and design—alongside professional support in editing, ghostwriting, authenticity reads, and consulting. This is a grounded space shaped by lived experience, artistic skill, and care. If this work resonates, consider becoming a paid subscriber for $10/month. You can see what I offer paid subscribers and founding members on my About page

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NaGloPoWriMo Day 13 has arrived with following prompt:

This prompt about a remembered landscape dropped into my morning and pulled two places up from wherever such things sleep.

I first stepped under the cedars at Salisbury at nine years old. I found Bellapais at thirteen. Eleven visits across a lifetime, and each time the same unnamed thing settles over me — a quietude, a serenity I seek nowhere else, in none of the other sacred places I love. York, Durham, Lindisfarne, Whitby, Canterbury all moved me in legible ways. These two reach past admiration into older country. They cast a spell and I keep returning to stand inside it.

Salisbury carries a second gravity for me. The Magna Carta originated here, sealed nearby in 1215, one of the earliest moments humanity wrote plurality into law rather than merely imagined it. Thingvellir in Iceland holds the same quality — a place where the ground itself remembers a turning point toward something larger than any single power. Salisbury belongs in that company. The garth and the charter occupy the same small city, and I feel both every time I cross the threshold.

The prompt drew the poem out. The poem drew the longing out. That surprised me.

Hand on Bark, Hand on Stone

I was nine
when the cedars at Salisbury Cathedral drew me in

wide arms, low and certain
they held the air in place
and I stepped under
as if I had always known the way

I named them mine
my cedars
my trees

I return
again and again
hand to bark
cool, ridged, steady
and something in me falls into their long time

arches carry the day in even measure
grass opens a quiet center
I walk the square
and the square walks me

and somewhere along the stone
a voice rises, old, composed

Lord, all pitying, Jesu blest,
Grant them Thine eternal rest.

it settles into the arches
as if it had always lived there


thirteen
and Bellapais Abbey lifts into light

stone opens
sky enters
blue stretches beyond the arches

on certain days
a line of Turkey rests far out
thin as a memory held at the edge of sight

warmth settles on skin
I touch the walls
smooth, sun-worn
I trace the work of hands
still speaking through each curve

and there, almost hidden
closer to breath than to stone

Seigneur, souviens-toi de moi

I read it once
and it stays


five visits
six visits
numbers fall away while I am there

one place gathers me
one place lets me open

both receive me
into a stillness
where nothing asks

only this

hand on bark hand on stone eye on horizon

And as always, thank you so much for reading.

Wild Lion*esses Lookout is a working studio—a space for creative work, vision, and collaboration.

Here, I share poetry, photography, digital art, and design—alongside professional support in editing, ghostwriting, authenticity reads, and consulting. This is a grounded space shaped by lived experience, artistic skill, and care. If this work resonates, consider becoming a paid subscriber for $10/month. You can see what I offer paid subscribers and founding members on my About page

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Forty Years in One Bite

April 12, 2026. 11:30 a.m. I bite into my first homemade bagel and my taste buds travel forty years in one chew.

New York, 1986. My first bagel ever — plain, cream cheese. I work through every variation after: lox, everything, sesame, all the permutations. I come back to plain every single time. Purist. Decided. Done.

Then come the European years. Bagels simply aren’t a thing in Germany. Occasionally, in the regions where American garrisons once ran deep — Hessen, Bayern, Baden-Württemberg — a supermarket shelf offers something bagel-shaped in a plastic bag. I try them. Concrete crust two to three millimetres thick. Rubber interior. Something vaguely bread-shaped, pretending. London. Mallorca. The story stays the same everywhere.

Michael Ruhlman’s newsletter pulls me down the rabbit hole to Bruce Ezzell’s recipe.

Ruhlman's Newsletter

Homemade Bagels!

I’ve been living in New York City for about ten years and full-time for the past four. Gotham is, of course, the bagel capital of the world. A couple blocks away from us, at Greenwich Ave and 11th St, is Apollo Bagel, which The Times says makes one of the best bagels in the city…

Read more

2 months ago · 82 likes · 44 comments · Michael Ruhlman

Yesterday everning I mix the sponge and walk away. Overnight it breathes — bubbles up, heaves, colonises the surface of the bowl into a lunar map, alive and doing its slow twelve-hour work. I photograph it. It looks like a small universe deciding what to become.

This morning I shape the dough and feel something I’d read about yet never touched: silk. Real silk. The dough springs back against my palms with elasticity, bounce — the kind I always assumed lived only inside professional bakeries south of 14th Street.

The crust on this bagel: under half a millimetre. Paper. A whisper. This is the whole secret, the thing the supermarket versions miss entirely. Their two-to-three-millimetre concrete shells forget the whole point: yield. This crust gives the moment I press. The crumb underneath stays dense and chewy and entirely itself.

Then the cream cheese.

Two things I’ve eaten for decades suddenly become a third — the two parts unlocking together what each hides alone. My tongue lands in Toronto 2002. San Francisco 1997. New York 1994. New York, 1986.

And now in Einbeck 2026.

Ode: Plain, with Cream Cheese

Forty years of waiting you arrive on my counter,
silky from overnight work,
springy under my palms
the way my hands remember.

I shape you by hand —
the pull, the curl, the ring —
drop you into alkaline water
where you float and shine, promise everything.

Paper-thin crust,
giving the moment I press —
the supermarket versions forgot this:
you yield.
Plain cream cheese.

Two things become a third.
My tongue lands in New York.
1986.

I make you again next month.

And as always, thank you so much for reading.

Wild Lion*esses Lookout is a working studio—a space for creative work, vision, and collaboration.

Here, I share poetry, photography, digital art, and design—alongside professional support in editing, ghostwriting, authenticity reads, and consulting. This is a grounded space shaped by lived experience, artistic skill, and care. If this work resonates, consider becoming a paid subscriber for $10/month. You can see what I offer paid subscribers and founding members on my About page

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NaPoWriMo today asked for an erasure poem.

I choose Canyonlands by Jerome Doolittle from the year 1978 page 46 to 48 from chapter 2 “The Rocks”

paths of least resistance (erasure from "The Rocks")

all day
falling —

the snow made the desert
a thing of soft mounds

turned to rain
the pale red
reappeared

naked again
glistening cold and wet

millions of years
standing exposed

carved so deeply
brought to view
its evolution

the oldest rocks
laid bare

the most ancient
given their name
when the region was covered by sea

to reach the canyon mouth
through ravines and over mesas
ending at a spot

dark silt had turned
thin mud into brown fluid

between the black
streaks dipped into printer's ink
hung out to drip dry


the discolorations brought to the surface
from underground — fairly new
deposited on top
the walls, red color, the most spectacular area

before the creation particles were rich
oxidized in the air now
exposed where erosion 
has cut through lamination lines

carried to their present location by currents
a sort of pavement, the rocks largely eroded away

30 million years 
to be read 
in the canyon walls 
in the fossils embedded in the rock

subterranean layers
a major chapter

intense evaporation
made the waters
more salty

alternating layers
beds more than a mile thick

the sea deepened

the weight
squeezed upward

cracks and faults
allowed
to flow
to the surface
along paths
of least resistance

And as always, thank you so much for reading.

Wild Lion*esses Lookout is a working studio—a space for creative work, vision, and collaboration.

Here, I share poetry, photography, digital art, and design—alongside professional support in editing, ghostwriting, authenticity reads, and consulting. This is a grounded space shaped by lived experience, artistic skill, and care. If this work resonates, consider becoming a paid subscriber for $10/month. You can see what I offer paid subscribers and founding members on my About page

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Monty: You have been gone ALL Day! I can be my own rock.

Today’s NaPoWriMo prompt invited a meditation on grief through repetition. I followed the form and listened for where the body speaks first.

I spent twelve hours and roughly twenty attempts trying to write a poem about grief. What I produced instead was a map of everywhere grief refused to live.

The prompt arrived clean and clear: Geoffrey Brock’s form, a repeated question, a meditation on grief. I started at eight-thirty in the morning with something resembling confidence. By mid-afternoon, the drafts multiplied and the subject retreated. Every version grew more precise. Every version landed somewhere else entirely — in exclusion, in the body’s German-language alarm, in the schoolyard, in the long education of learning to stand in open space and stay.

My body answered the question. The answer just didn’t match the word.

When Connie died — twenty-two years, four days into the first German pandemic lockdown, her family already clearing the room — grief arrived for one brief, cracked-open moment in the church. Salt ran. Breath heaved. I fell apart in full view. Then the phones began. Orders multiplied. The company demanded both hands, then more. I made a deliberate choice: gratitude over circling. The effect landed fast and held. The expected season of grief simply did not unfold.

I spent the rest of the day trying to write around that. The prompts’ question — where did grief go — turned out to be mine all along.

Around eight-thirty in the evening I conceded the original assignment and accepted the actual one. I couldn’t write something I’d never carried in my body in the prescribed way. Sadness, yes. Loneliness, yes. The particular enragement of being cast out by people who thought they owned the ritual of loss — absolutely. Grief as a sustained, housed presence? My body searched and returned empty.

The poem I ended up circling writes about the pivot itself: grief as a brief visitor, gratitude as the one who stayed and rearranged the furniture. Brock’s repeated question gave me the container. The form held the passage of a feeling rather than its residence.

Writing the poem this way clarified something I’d sensed for years. Grief functions largely as a social contract — a performance others need in order to feel certain the loss counted. When the performance doesn’t arrive on schedule, the room goes strange. Their searching faces became part of the material. The poem holds those faces too.

This piece documents a choice, and the long sequence of releases that followed it. The company. The house. The landscape I grew up in. All of it entered a gradual loosening from the same ground zero. What reads as a single day in a church keeps unfolding. It still does.

Where Grief Turned

I sit in the church and sob through every prayer
salt runs warm, breath heaves, wood chills my palms
flowers breathe sweetness into thick air
I open at last in full sight

Where did grief turn
it moved through my chest and kept on moving

Where did grief turn
phones rang, orders rose, days asked for both hands

Where did grief turn
I chose gratitude and calm entered the room

Where did grief turn
eyes kept searching my face and met stillness

Where did grief turn
twenty-two years stood whole and shone

I walk on and carry each day as warmth
German reaches my ear and muscle lifts at once
girls step back, boys step back, space opens
I hold my own ground
belonging starts here

And as always, thank you so much for reading.

Wild Lion*esses Lookout is a working studio—a space for creative work, vision, and collaboration.

Here, I share poetry, photography, digital art, and design—alongside professional support in editing, ghostwriting, authenticity reads, and consulting. This is a grounded space shaped by lived experience, artistic skill, and care. If this work resonates, consider becoming a paid subscriber for $10/month. You can see what I offer paid subscribers and founding members on my About page

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NaPoWriMo Day 9

The prompt for today draws inspiration from the meticulously detailed work of Marianne Moore. It asks us to look past the surface of the natural world and find the intersection between biological life and the weight of history.

When today’s prompt arrived I knew immediately which living thing called. Yet the poem took its time finding its shape. I spent the morning in deep conversation — researching, questioning, layering — before the structure revealed itself: a parent speaking to a child.

My parents planted this tree. Both are gone now. It stands 23 meters tall in this garden I grew up in, and we hold a legal obligation to keep it there — rooted, immovable, belonging to the house as much as the house belongs to the land.

So when a seedling appeared in my balcony planter — 10 centimeters of lime-green new life, arriving after fifty years of the parent tree trying — I understood immediately what I held.

When I finally leave Einbeck for new horizons, the parent tree stays. Legally, necessarily, permanently. Yet the child travels with me — the only living piece of something my parents grew, distilled into a handful of balcony soil, heading toward European coastlines neither of us has reached yet.

The parent’s voice arrived first. Ancient, calm, carrying everything across 90 million years toward one small listening thing.

I wrote toward what the tree already knew.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

What You Are 

You — Metasequoia glyptostroboides.
Say it slow. Carry it.
Humans once declared us gone, filed us under fossil, under finished.

5,393 of us hold on in one wild valley in Hubei, China —
and the number falls each season.
Your lineage runs 300 times older than the hands that nearly erased us.

I grew in air so thick and warm the world ran tropical pole to pole.
I held every needle, all year long.
Enormous creatures moved through our forest like weather —
certain, slow, enormous —
stripped my cones from their stalks,
swallowed them whole,
seeded whole continents through their passing.

Those same small woody globes that woke you into that balcony soil.
The cold arrived. Slowly. A continent of ice grinding south across millennia.
My sisters locked into stone one by one.
I learned the hardest thing —
pull the sweetness back into your heartwood first,
then open your hands.
Spring always returned.
For millions of years I pressed into one river valley
while scientists carved my name into the fossil record as absence.

In 1944, men with notebooks walked into that valley
and found me breathing.
Three years ago someone took my south face.
I carry that flat wall now, written into wood.

Still — every March I pour gold into the gales.
Watch for it —
pollen lifting like starlings turning,
crossing every fence, every shear blade.
The female cones follow close.
October I open my hands again,
copper needles silting both yards in the same rusty silk,
the fence line dissolving beneath.

Then you arrived.
One seed. Fifty years of my trying.
Landing above the argument entirely.
When adolescence reaches you
you’ll grow feathery, wide, permeable —
your shadow floating like mimosa in afternoon light,
moisture gathering beneath you,
enough light through for whatever wants to grow there.

The air thickens again out there, little one.
CO₂ climbing back toward the world I first breathed.
Hold your needles longer this season.
I’ll show you how.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

About Metasequoia glyptostroboides - Dawn Redwood

A lineage 90-100 million years old — roughly 300 times older than our own species. The Dawn Redwood grew in a world running pole-to-pole tropical, CO₂ exceeding 1,000 parts per million, holding its needles year-round in air so rich its rings fattened twice as fast as any tree grows today. Sauropods moved through its forests, stripping its cones, seeding whole continents through their passing.

The ice ages taught it the hardest lesson: let go deliberately. Every sister species locked into stone. This one learned to shed its needles each autumn, go quiet through the dark months, return in spring. The only deciduous conifer of its kind.

Paleobotanists declared it extinct in 1941. It kept growing in a remote valley in Hubei, China. In 1944, scientists trekked in and found it breathing. Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum scattered its seeds globally in 1948.

Today the IUCN Red List classifies it Endangered. Roughly 5,393 wild trees survive across three fragmented Chinese locations, their numbers falling each decade.

Each March it erupts gold into the gales — pollen lifting in murmurations across every fence and shear blade. Male strobili fall first, female cones follow close. Seven months of quiet. Then October’s copper needle rain silts both sides of every property line in the same rusty silk.

One tree. Both sexes. Complete in itself.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

And as always, thank you so much for reading.

Wild Lion*esses Lookout is a working studio—a space for creative work, vision, and collaboration.

Here, I share poetry, photography, digital art, and design—alongside professional support in editing, ghostwriting, authenticity reads, and consulting. This is a grounded space shaped by lived experience, artistic skill, and care. If this work resonates, consider becoming a paid subscriber for $10/month. You can see what I offer paid subscribers and founding members on my About page

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Day 7 of NaPoWriMo arrived with a Childhood Game

There was one big problem.

I don’t know any.

I stood outside every clapping game I ever watched. My hands stayed still while theirs moved. I absorbed the rhythm through my eyes and never once joined the circle.

So when this prompt arrived I had nothing to imitate and everything to feel. I reached for ropes and colors and protest chants and disco floors before I found my way in — through the body, through the beat, through the one song I always knew lived here.

This poem dances. It does not jump rope.

I Am Who I Am

Whole in my soul, free in my skin,
Wide as the canyon, vast within.

Soft in the front, strong in the back,
Grounded and found, on my own track.

Rise in the light, shine where I stand,
Open and rooted, sea to land.

I am who I am, you are who you are,
Queer and divine, we are the star.

L - G - B - T - Q - I - A,
We dance our truth every single day.

And as always, thank you so much for reading.

Wild Lion*esses Lookout is a working studio—a space for creative work, vision, and collaboration.

Here, I share poetry, photography, digital art, and design—alongside professional support in editing, ghostwriting, authenticity reads, and consulting. This is a grounded space shaped by lived experience, artistic skill, and care. If this work resonates, consider becoming a paid subscriber for $10/month. You can see what I offer paid subscribers and founding members on my About page

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From the NaPoWriMo prompt for Day 6:

And now, to put theory in our practice, here’s our optional prompt! This one takes its inspiration from Yentl van Stokkum’s poem, “It’s the Warmest Summer on Record Babe,” which blends casual, almost blasé phrasing with surreal events like getting advice from a bumblebee. In your poem today, try writing with a breezy, conversational tone, while including at least one thing that could only happen in a dream.

My poem responds to Yentl van Stokkum’s It’s the Warmest Summer on Record Babe, where language moves in full, unbroken thought while the line breaks quietly steer rhythm and emphasis. I stayed with that structure: conversational sentences that carry forward, while each line shifts weight, timing, and attention.

The prompt asked for something that could only happen in a dream. I chose not to leave reality. Instead, I worked at its edge. The swans appearing on the frozen Alster in January follow the internal logic of Hamburg and at the same time exceed it. The moment remains plausible and still feels slightly impossible.

The poem speaks as an inner continuation of a conversation. “Oma” is present inside the movement of thought, not addressed formally, not explained. The voice carries memory forward as if she could still hear it.

The day itself is real. Five people stood there. Two remain. I did not state this directly. The poem relies on image and sequence to hold what changed.

Like the original, the language stays almost casual while the scene carries the weight. The work happens in what is shown, in how long a moment can hold, and in how quietly it lets go.

THE COLDEST WINTER ON RECORD

I wake up thinking of that winter again Oma
the one where the Elbe carried ice like broken plates
and we drove to Övelgönne early
before the crowds found it

the old ships stood still
caught deeper than anything they had known at sea
and out beyond them the container ships moved anyway
slow careful
an icebreaker in front

I keep seeing that
something that large
moving because something smaller insists

we did not stay long
our faces had limits
the car filled with heat almost immediately
and then the Alster

frozen flat
carpet laid across the ice
so even you could walk out
and we stopped at the last booth
because that was where our legs ended

you held your Tote Tante with both hands
cream already sinking
the boys watching everything
as if the city had shifted a degree

and then they brought them out
for the festival
as if January had agreed to it

the swans

not one
all of them
walking the edge of the ice
led by the Schwanenvater
in his dark coat
like it had always been done this way

I remember thinking
this should not be happening
and still it did

you did not say anything
you just watched
the way you watched the ships

steam rising between your fingers
the boys leaning forward
white moving across grey

I keep coming back to that moment Oma
the way everything held
just long enough

as if the city knew
and made room for it

And as always, thank you so much for reading.

Wild Lion*esses Lookout is a working studio—a space for creative work, vision, and collaboration.

Here, I share poetry, photography, digital art, and design—alongside professional support in editing, ghostwriting, authenticity reads, and consulting. This is a grounded space shaped by lived experience, artistic skill, and care. If this work resonates, consider becoming a paid subscriber for $10/month. You can see what I offer paid subscribers and founding members on my About page

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NaPoWriMo Day five. Two prompts landed in my lap this morning.

Alex Dawson asked for a poem containing the sentence “the night had teeth” — verbatim.

And here is the official NaPoWriMo prompt:

And now, here’s our prompt for the day — totally optional, as usual. The Roman poet Catullus wrote a famous two-line poem:

Odi et amo: quare id faciam fortasse requiris.
Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.

Here’s an English translation.

I hate and I love. Why do I do this, you ask?
I don’t know, but I feel it happening and am tortured.

I thought about this poem the other day when I read a social media post collecting sentences from Charles Darwin’s letters, including:

“Oh my God how do I hate species & varieties.”

“I am very tired, very stomachy & hate nearly the whole world.”

“I am very poorly today & very stupid & hate everybody & everything.”

“I hate myself, I hate clover, and I hate bees.”

“I am languid & bedeviled & hate writing & hate everybody.”

I must confess, the idea of being so grumpy that you have come to hate clover and bees is highly amusing to me. Today, your challenge is to take a page from Catullus and Darwin, and write a poem in which you talk about disliking something – particularly something utterly innocuous, like clover. Be over the top! Be a bit silly and overdramatic.

Happy grumpy writing!

My day delivered a philosopher-cat who infiltrated my duvet while I slept, and a Tuesday in Kassel where twenty minutes with a broken heater and a grandfather desk outweighed every page my psychiatrist ever signed.

Two poems. Both bit.

For the NaPoWriMo Prompt:

SCHEMA F

I despise Schema F — 
one form, pre-printed, outweighing every scar, 
every page my psychiatrist ever signed, 
every year I lived outside the standard.

and on ’s prompt:

Carpe Noctem

The seam splits—
warmth escapes. Familiar. Close.

Duvet cracks,
fault line to forbidden dark.

Whiskers brush ceiling-cloth,
paws plunge velvet heat.
Ancient tunnel beckons,
world thick, secret.

Belly low over sleeping ridges,
rise, fall—reckless quiet thrills.

Shapes twitch.
Coil. Spring.
Claws claim, teeth pierce
soft yield.

Jippee!

"OUCH!!!!"

Ceiling vaults,
light invades ruin.
Body bolts skyward.

Eyes lock—sleepy, sharp.
Voice drops, soft wonder:
"The night had teeth."

I blink slow, sheepish—
eyes wide, innocent half-moon,
tail-tip twitching unrepentant apology.

Carpe noctem
Night, still mine.

And as always, thank you so much for reading.

Wild Lion*esses Lookout is a working studio—a space for creative work, vision, and collaboration.

Here, I share poetry, photography, digital art, and design—alongside professional support in editing, ghostwriting, authenticity reads, and consulting. This is a grounded space shaped by lived experience, artistic skill, and care. If this work resonates, consider becoming a paid subscriber for $10/month. You can see what I offer paid subscribers and founding members on my About page

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Day four. One prompt. One sky that couldn’t make up its mind.

Today’s NaPoWriMo prompt invited a short poem around weather and the season:

In his poem, “Spring Thunder,” Mark van Doren brings us a short, haunting evocation of weather and the change in seasons. Today, we’d like to challenge you to craft your own short poem that involves a weather phenomenon and some aspect of the season. Try using rhyme and keeping your lines of roughly even length.

I took it to the hills I live among, where April performs a daily atmospheric argument nobody wins.

The Alpine-Arctic Tug-of-War. The Graupelschauer, showers of soft hail, arriving without warning. The backside weather scrubbing everything to cobalt and impossible green. The next front already gathering before the last one clears.

South Lower Saxony in April asks only one thing of you: stay curious.

The Hills Lift Everything

The arctic tug-of-war brings April near,
Where sea and land-born winds begin their play—
The rising hills meet every front to steer,
And spring joins warmly with the winter fray.

The Graupelschauer bursts the darkened sky,
A swooping gust to drop the temperature—
Each milky pellet bouncing, rolling by,
As April slams the door to stay secure.

The backside weather scours the hills to gold,
cumulus cathedrals cold and white —
the shadows race as fast as they are bold,
and every ridge stands razor-edged in light.

The sun and drenching rain arrive as one,
The hills lift everything they find—
The next front rises with the morning sun:
Has April left the last behind?

And as always, thank you so much for reading.

Wild Lion*esses Lookout is a working studio—a space for creative work, vision, and collaboration.

Here, I share poetry, photography, digital art, and design—alongside professional support in editing, ghostwriting, authenticity reads, and consulting. This is a grounded space shaped by lived experience, artistic skill, and care. If this work resonates, consider becoming a paid subscriber for $10/month. You can see what I offer paid subscribers and founding members on my About page

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Today’s official NaPoWriMo prompt asked us to write a poem in which a profession or vocation gets described differently than its archetype expects — inspired by Prabodh Parikh’s boisterous, treasure-hunting pirate of a poet:

Today, we challenge you to write a poem in which a profession or vocation is described differently than it typically is considered to be. Perhaps your poem will feature a very relaxed brain surgeon, or a farmer that hates vegetables. Or maybe you have a poetical alter-ego of your own, who flies a non-wan, treasure-hunting flag with pride.

My vocation is food. The archetype says: nurture, serve, feed others. I say: stand at the stove the way a philosopher stands at a window. Already inside the thinking.

Recipe for the Cook Who Feeds Nobody

Yield: one. Always one.

Ingredients:

1 Marillen from the Wachau, frozen,
   waiting for the essay they don’t know they’re in yet

1 drawer containing: toothpicks, rubber bands,
   razor blades, batteries of uncertain charge,
   three corks, one question about sustainable farming,
   no answers

water — and pay attention here,
   because water from the tap in Einbeck
   tastes nothing like water from the tap in Freiburg
   tastes nothing like water from a spring
   above a village nobody has heard of
   and this matters, this matters,
   even if you think it doesn’t,
   especially if you think it doesn’t

salt, obviously,
   yet which salt, which salt

Method:

1. Clear the kitchen of expectations.
   This includes guests.
2. Stand at the stove the way a philosopher stands at a window —
   not waiting for anything,
   already inside the thinking.
3. Taste the difference.
   Taste it again.
   Write nothing down yet.
   Let it live in the body first
   where language can’t tidy it.
4. Argue with yourself about the tomatoes.
   The sustainable ones cost twice as much
   and you’re cooking for one
   and leaving anyway —
   the freezer already judging you
   from across the room.
   Lose the argument.
   Buy the tomatoes.
   Or don’t.
   Document the guilt either way.
5. Understand the Black Forest Cherry Cake
   is never only a cake.
   Nobody needs to know this.
   The cake knows.
6. Add heat.

The pirate here doesn’t want your appetite.
The pirate wants your attention.
There’s a difference.
Most dinner guests never learned it.

Note: 
This recipe scales to one. It has always scaled to one. This is a feature.

Alex Dawson asked us:

Write a poem about what would be found in your personal “lost and found” box.

I had a problem with that framing — so I followed the problem down into the canyon instead.

And as always, thank you so much for reading.

Wild Lion*esses Lookout is a working studio—a space for creative work, vision, and collaboration.

Here, I share poetry, photography, digital art, and design—alongside professional support in editing, ghostwriting, authenticity reads, and consulting. This is a grounded space shaped by lived experience, artistic skill, and care. If this work resonates, consider becoming a paid subscriber for $10/month. You can see what I offer paid subscribers and founding members on my About page

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Many poetry prompts circulate on Substack these day. I join the ones that speak to me immediately. Yesterday I stumbled into and her offerings; today she asks us to write an “an unconventional “To do list” poem”. I did that too, you’ll find it below my contribution for the official NaPoWriMo prompt, which asks us to return to our childhood.

Speaking of things that are unsettling, it’s now time for our daily prompt — optional, as always! In her poem, “Pittsylvania County,” Ellen Bryant Voigt recounts watching her father and brother play catch with sensory detail and a strangely foreboding sense of inevitability. The speaker watches the scene, but is outside of it – cut off. She’s not so much jealous of the interaction between her father and brother, as filled with a pervading sense that she wants something more or different from life than what the moment seems to presage. Today, we’d like to challenge you to write your own poem in which you recount a childhood memory. Try to incorporate a sense of how that experience indicated to you, even then, something about the person you’d grow up to be.

Four years old. Two games. Neither one mine.

Halber Junge

At three I already knew the word no
aimed at me like a correction —
my whole body already turning
toward dark, toward rough, toward real.

They called me Halber Junge.
Half a boy.
As if I were a fraction
of something
rather than the whole
of something else entirely.

I stood on the playground
and watched two games run at once —
both games left a gap
the exact shape of me.

Maybe it was. Maybe they felt the current
I felt,
the one that said:
fit, shrink, mirror, comply,
you are a member here,
membership carries conditions.

I felt it. I stood in it
the way you stand in a river
and feel the pull
and plant your feet anyway.

I still searched for
what I was planting them toward.
Only that Halber Junge
already sounded more like me
than anything the room expected,

that the child left outside both circles
already knew
what the adult
would spend decades
learning to say out loud:

I am whole.
The gap you see
is your measuring.

Now your turn.

What childhood memory already carried the shape of who you’d become? What did your body know before your words caught up?

Share your poem — or even just the memory — in the comments. Every form welcome. Every language welcome. Every length welcome.

We write to find out what we already knew.

And this is my unusual To Do List.

The April 1st prompt by was: Write a poem about someone who played the fool; either yourself or someone else in honour of April Fool’s Day

I contributed:

What do you you think? What would be your unusual To Do List? Let me know in the comments.

Leave a comment

Thank you so much for reading.

Wild Lion*esses Lookout is a working studio—a space for creative work, vision, and collaboration.

Here, I share poetry, photography, digital art, and design—alongside professional support in editing, ghostwriting, authenticity reads, and consulting. This is a grounded space shaped by lived experience, artistic skill, and care. If this work resonates, consider becoming a paid subscriber for $10/month. You can see what I offer paid subscribers and founding members on my About page

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Prefer to give once?

You can leave a one-time donation or buy me a coffee., or just to say “I see you.” Every bit is felt.

Buy treats for Sir Montgomery

Your support keeps this space honest, independent, and alive.
Thank you. 🏳️‍🌈❤️😻