in her nature

Writing with love to women & gender expansive people of colour.

[inhernature]

Egress [“What is it like,”]

What is it like to be carouseled in the circular dreams of fools, a play ride with suspended hopes that really takes you nowhere. Well, wher

What is it like,

                              to be shackled to the chains of freedom,

to the glee of greener pasture? What is it like

                   to be carouseled in the circular dreams of fools,

a play ride

          with suspended hopes that really takes you nowhere.

And a few weeks ago, in my daughter’s old stroller,

                                                 I tended to the wren’s eggs

and watched the hatched birdies

                                                       call out feathers to their wings.

And you wonder why I refuse to learn an old anthem

                               where there is nothing old or new to grasp.

Well, where the young are haunted by the nostalgias of the old, 

     who entrusts the future to the hands of destruction?

Who?

     I promise you, I am not angry, I am just tired of  believing

in a future led by fools.

         And if you hear fool one more time, bear with me.

I come from a nest of oafs.

                                            I come from a nest, of oafs.

Source: Poetry (May 2026)

[caribbeanangel]

Assata Shakur, Affirmation.

[inhernature]

Excerpt from Affirmation:

I believe in living.

I believe in the spectrum

of Beta days and Gamma people.

I believe in sunshine.

In windmills and waterfalls,

tricycles and rocking chairs.

And i believe that seeds grow into sprouts.

And sprouts grow into trees.

I believe in the magic of the hands.

And in the wisdom of the eyes.

I believe in rain and tears.

And in the blood of infinity.

Shared in full here

[caribbeanangel]

Nikki Giovanni (1974)

[inhernature]

"poetry is a living entity which means it

must expand its wings

it must fly"

[julesofnature]

“Teach the children. We don't matter so much, but the children do. Show them daisies and the pale hepatica. Teach them the taste of sassafras and wintergreen. The lives of the blue sailors, mallow, sunbursts, the moccasin flowers. And the frisky ones – inkberry, lamb's-quarters, blueberries. And the aromatic ones – rosemary, oregano. Give them peppermint to put in their pockets as they go to school. Give them the fields and the woods and the possibility of the world salvaged from the lords of profit. Stand them in the stream, head them upstream, rejoice as they learn to love this space they live in, its sticks and leaves and then the silent, beautiful blossoms. Attention is the beginning of devotion.” ― Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays

[inhernature]

Who can begrudge us a few fantasies here and there?

[apesoformythoughts]

“The unity of a human life is the unity of a narrative quest.”

— Alasdair MacIntyre

[inhernature]

My father taught me how to write: / على قد لحافك، مد رجليك.

Yahya Ashour

My father taught me how to write: على قد لحافك، مد رجليك. Extend your legs as far as your blanket.

When I find parts of my poems   exposed, I amputate them.

I keep them tucked in   light or night, away from those hunting   for lines that don’t fit their blankets not realizing poetry lies

in a poet’s satisfaction with their blanket.

In my pursuit of tender lines, I’ve become a butcher, committing crimes against myself for the sake of  beauty.

Copyright © 2026 by Yahya Ashour. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 20, 2026, by the Academy of American Poets.

[inhernature]

I am fine and of course I am lying / remember

Maha Hashwi

I am fine and of course I am lying remember   I am Lebanese

or nod ask how everyone I know is doing   don’t

you see   that far away country   my mother

bursts into tears   the front door   resilient

smoke   dust   the rubble has become

blanket and bed   warm like mine   the fire

is blazing   the flag   burnt flesh on a phone screen

the demolition   of war   what is the definition

fleeing their homes   they are   dying

they are not   crying out for help   lend a

hand   hold a   heart

for being arab   I am not brave

Copyright © 2026 by Maha Hashwi. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 19, 2026, by the Academy of American Poets.

[inhernature]

(via Lara Atallah: "Spectral Prophecies")

Speckled omens leave their fingerprints on their ghostly faces. The fleeting patter of rain slicks the asphalt beneath them. This is how history gets rewritten: in the gaps between their bodies, against the backdrop of early spring. Somewhere in the long middle of the end. He, in military attire, an oak tree with galaxies smeared inside him. She, a forest in a barren world. By now, I know how this story goes. The war will architect their undoing, decades and petty arguments stacked up against a god of futile things. Illness will harvest their lifespans. He will gasp for eight years, bargaining with fate. Her heart will break again and again until it gives out. Between them, a daughter. One day, a mother whose face will mark mine. In that moment, flanked by her parents, she stands infinite as the trees behind her. Hair draping shoulders. Body barely pubescent. Hand over heart. You can tell she still believes the world loves her. Head tilted upwards, she dreams herself in-flight, hedging her bets on the vastness of a borderless sky.

Copyright © 2026 by Lara Atallah. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 4, 2026, by the Academy of American Poets.

[weltenwellen]

Carl Phillips, from “Civilization”, Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007-2020

[inhernature]

There's an art    

to everything. Even    

turning away. How

eventually even hunger    

can become a space

to live in.

[inhernature]

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[inhernature]

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Titilope Sonuga

[inhernature]

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Literary Theory

Somehow the word allow is in the word swallow and in swallow two wholly different meanings: one to take in through the mouth and another what we call the common winged gnat hunter who is, in all probability, somewhere near us now. Once, I thought if I knew all the words I would say the right thing in the right way, instead language becomes more brutish: blink twice for the bird, blink once for tender annihilation. Who knows what we are doing as we go about our days lazily choosing our languages. Some days my life is held together by definitions, some days I read the word swallow and all my feathers show.

[inhernature]

by Danusha Laméris

Hear me: Sometimes thunder is just thunder. The dog barking is only a dog. Leaves fall from the trees because the days are getting shorter, by which I mean, not the days we have left, but the actual length of time, given the tilt of earth and distance from the sun. My nephew used to see a therapist who mentioned that, at play, he sank a toy ship and tried to save the captain. Not, he said,that we want to read anything into that. Who can read the world? It’s paragraphs of cloud, and alphabets of dust. Just now a night bird outside my window made a single plaintive cry that wafted up between the trees. Not, I’m sure, that it was meant for me.

[inhernature]

Jane Hirshfield

We sit on our skeletons’ bones. We hear with our skeletons’ bones. We speak of beauty by moving our jaws and our teeth.

The original meaning of Paradise: a place, a walled garden. Our lives, our stories, this hour inside one. A staircase from Piranesi. A hummingbird drinking.

Outside it, vanishing species and rivers. Outside it, Nanjing, Ninevah, Dresden. Outside it, Gaza, Sudan, Myanmar, Kyiv. Here.

The world starts and ends, starts, ends, ends again, restarts.  

A kalpa is brief, and wall-less.

Unborn ones, take nothing for granted. Not nectar, not thirst.

May your lives be uneclipsed, your failures be passing.

May you have your portions of beauty, of grief, in a garden whose plants and birds I cannot imagine.

[inhernature]

The final song here is a setting for "At last…Another's heartbeat," a poem written by Marcellus "Khaliifah" Williams, a man who — in the face of death — still chose to see the beauty of this world. This song, not yet recorded, is a communal one. "There is so much beauty and comfort in being in love and just being," we sing with her, over and over, as a prayer.. Her last word is a whisper — like a last breath — then the silence of being.

At last…Another’s heartbeat

By Marcellus "Khaliifah" Williams

the silhouettes of their bond visible still at the last glow of the sun they experience each other and the life of the night as it begins to stir standing there in silence holding hands no rush to go back inside there is so much beauty and comfort in being in love and just being... - amidst sounds of buzzing chirps crickets the pleasant but irregular blowing of the wind fireflies dancing in step with the light of the moon how strange it is to become aware of another's heartbeat but forget one's own- finally love.

Khaliifah requests that his writings remain in the public domain, forever free.

[creativepromptsforwriting]

Hi! This is my first time asking, but your prompts are amazing! It’s almost like you’ve experienced these scenarios with how detailed you are! Any who, I was curious about tips on starting off a story. What are the best ways to hook a reader in the beginning?

Aww that is actually one of the best compliments I had so far!

How to start a story

don't start with descriptions

the reader can get bored if the descriptions are too long

they won't remember details until they actually formed a connection to the situation and the characters

start with a prologue or flashforward or flashback

this way you can show what's going to come or what happened so far to get the reader hooked

a lot of writers advice against using dream sequences and the character waking up as the beginning of the story, because it can seem lazy

start with action

hook the reader by throwing them right into action

they get invested sooner in the plot and the characters

they want to find out more about the context that brought them to this point

build an emotional connection

start by showing an emotional scene or present the character's goals and intentions and motivation to make people relate to them and their struggle

surprise the reader

start in an unusual situation, something that may even confuse the reader at first (but not too much, you should resolve it quickly to get them to keep reading)

leave them with questions they want to find the answers for

I hope this helps you and good luck writing!

- Jana