Read “The Kingfisher” by Mary Oliver. Notice her use of adjectives and adverbs and how she chooses simple, plain words. Think of an animal you admire. Write a poem that uses simple, plain adjectives and adverbs to describe an animal you admire. Let it surprise you.

At the Boathouse Cafe

We’re surprised when, just beyond
where a guy waits in a rowboat to be handed his lunch
over the railing of the lakeside cafe,
a cormorant surfaces with a flat, fringed fish
in its beak. Once we’ve swallowed that, we see
that this whole city lake is swarming.
Turtles, including one with a neck like Hulk Hogan
and a shell the size of a turkey platter, who gazes
directly at us like feeding him is our most
obvious obligation in life.
Two—no, four—no, two dozen enormous, unbeautiful
koi who come roiling and open-mouthed when
the busboy tosses an uneaten Parker House roll
into the water. They turn, gliding toward us
with whiskered mouths open above the surface,
making our mission,
should we choose to accept it, as easy as possible.
Which is a gift in this city where everything feels hard
despite being designed for convenience.
It would be easy
to feed these beasts, but the density, the intensity,
the size and the weight of the city have made us
feel small and desperate,
too small to share.

^{draft ©HM 2026}

Read “Letter to the Person Who, During the Q&A Session After the Reading, Asked for Career Advice” by Matthew Olzmann. Write a poem in the form of a letter to someone who is asking you for advice. This could be based on an actual event, but it might not be. If you could give advice on something, anything, what would you want to say?

I’ve been asked for a little advice here and there on the practicalities, and my unsolicited advice is being warmly if cautiously tolerated. For this I’m very grateful…and clearly I have a few other words to share.

To Their First Apartment
           Tompkins Square Park

Hold, but not too tight.
They are pretty sure about this, but there could be tricky sticking 
points lurking. Your economical 8-foot width  
is already causing conflict about placement of the bed.
Thank you for keeping details thereof to yourself;
it’s not so long ago they were our innocents.

Be light, be bright, 
be cozy at night, and let your whitewashed brick accept reversible
hanging strategies. Let your walls reflect their faces; 
let your kitchen reflect their complementary tastes.
Thank you for offering further surprises, like the cupboard 
behind the bathroom mirror that didn’t open at first.

Welcome friends easily,
even if no meals are served; shut safe when the world outside 
is too much with them. Be bigger on the inside.
Thank you for your two generous views: garbage out
the front, garden out the back. Let love in its witty socks
slide smoothly across your hardwood floors.

draft ©HM 2026

Greetings, Poetry People! This is my first Blogger post that will also be posted at my fledgling Substack. Bit by bit I hope to shift completely over to Substack for all kinds of functionally modern reasons, with due respect to Blogger for providing *my juicy little universe* with a comfortable home for coming on 18 years. I don’t have Substack set up quite as I’d like yet, but I hope you’ll recognize me here and subscribe and like and share and all that.

And now, this month’s Inkling challenge, simply set by Mary Lee:

Use a recent comment on one of your posts as a line in a poem.

Great idea! I often find that I myself am leaving a Poetry Friday blog comment that, inspired by the post itself, becomes rather poetic. In fact I have a running record of such comments of my own that might become something later. But I believe Mary Lee really meant someone else’s comment, so I trawled through the Comments page on the back end of Blogger.

I decided, after some internal debate, not to use this one:

JAMES MOSHER commented on “unearthing the good news”

Apr 3, 2026

My heart is so filled with joy. If you are suffering from Erectile dysfunction or any other disease you can contact Dr. Moses Buba.

🤔

But as I intentionally move into a new commentable space on the Internet, I also have to consider anew what it means to offer my poetic innards up to the public, and this one, from our friend Joyce Ray, caught my eye.

Unknown commented on “npm poetry friday: ✒️”WE TEACH POETRY” - video conversation with Jone Rush MacCulloch, Margaret Simon & me”

Apr 19, 2026

I didn’t mean to be Anonymous. It’s Joyce Ray.

And while I was searching my blog, I came uponmy post about the Faultline poetry form, which struck me as a fun thing to play with today again. And thus, “Advice from the Comment Section”

It should have that little extra piece at the bottom with the fault line, “I didn’t mean to be Anonymous. It’s Joyce Ray,” but you see how that’s a bit odd in this context. Do you think it’s okay to stick with just this?

I didn’t mean to be Anonymous.

Thanks to Mona for rounding us up today at her What’s New? page. I’m late finishing this post but the light of June is now fully illuminating the pretty murky tunnel that was May and I look forward to getting around to everyone’s posts!

_____________________________________________________

***FOOTNOTE

“Thou shalt not read the comments section, lest thou covet thy neighbor’s likes. Anyone who uses social media religiously knows that there’s one main rule of the Internet. Well, one main rule besides “CATS, CATS ALWAYS”. It’s to stay outta the comments section; for the love of all that is #holy, stay out of it. Luckily the ever-wise winner of our Internet challenge did the best thing you can do short of hanging a virtual sign on every comments section that says, “HERE BE MONSTERS!”; Rodrigo Leonardo Batista Ferreira (@rodrigobhz) created a design that sums up this number one commandment of the Internet, albeit swapping the stone tablet for a touchscreen one.”

---a pretty good explanation of the idea that it’s wiser to post without regard to everyone else’s responses; take the likes and shares and don’t dig too deep, from this post at Threadless where I went to make sure I understood the concept of “Don’t read the comments” correctly before I then referred to it in my post title. It’s very time-consuming being a person who likes to be as factually accurate as possible all the time. Except in my actual poems, which is why writing poetry is awfully freeing, almost like an anxiety medication.

I could be planful and organized or I could just plunge in…

Welcome to the new home of my blog, *my juicy little universe.* After reading, you could pop over to https://myjuicylittleuniverse.blogspot.com/ to get all the backstory—all the way back to 2008.

I’ve been loving the monthly list of prompts gifted to all of us by Audrey Gidman (see below), and today I’m christening June as the aftermath of quite a May. The prompt (with which I routinely play fast and loose) is:

Ask yourself, “did I survive?” Write a poem in which each line is a reason why the answer is yes.

Thanks to 10,000 Maniacs for all the goods. Thanks to you, for reading! Comments welcome.

despair, you cannot have me

June Poetry Prompt Calendar

It’s become a meditative practice for me to curate and create these prompt calendars, fueled partially by my own joy and partially, now, by the delightfully bewildering fact that so many, many, many of you are writing daily because of them! And allowing yourselves to be led by them…

Read more

18 days ago · 24 likes · 4 comments