April '25 Recap

I hear it's the cruelest month.

April may be unnecessarily cruel, but it’s also National Poetry Month, and damn if I don’t like a good challenge. 30 poems in 30 days? I’m down.

For NaPoMo I used Taylor Byas and Séamus Fey’s form challenge calendar, which I started using last year, as a prompt for each day of April. It’s always fun to play with my favorite forms and explore new ones. (No need to talk about the forms I dislike… cough the ballad cough)

This year, I was exceptionally fond of the cradle-magnolia, a new poetic form created by Patrycja Humienik. It’s a dreamy one. Here’s my attempt at the cradle-magnolia, which I wrote on April 5:

on a drive home from work I wonder if you know what it feels like before it begins. 
I wonder if you know what you will become, if you build your cocoon 
without knowing how you will emerge. I wish I could be so brave.
I think of how you become soup. I wonder how
that feels, too, to lose all of your defined edges. 
must we change without knowing?
or can we know before we start?
I am soft around the edges too, you know,  
beginning to become something of which I am not yet 
aware. today my gender is soup. I sit in the slippery discomfort,
wrap myself in a warm blanket, wonder in the grey morning light. 
I never knew what it felt like to become. you didn’t either, I think. none of us do. 

You can read the rest of my NaPoMo poems on Twitter, all in this neat thread.

In terms of publications, new poems of mine appeared in Circus Collective and fifth wheel press this month. Please check them out—these are two of my favorite publishers and I am always delighted to work with Devon and nat.

My semester is almost over, and I honestly cannot believe it is coming to an end. For those not in the know, I’ve been teaching a 3-credit information and technological literacy course for undergraduates. It fills a core requirement at my university, so it’s popular class! It’s also incredibly practical—research skills, technology skills, and information/media/news/data literacy skills are all essential.

Teaching has been a wonderful experience, even though it’s also been exhausting. This is my first time teaching an entire course, and it’s been a ton of work. Creating lessons and materials, making sure students understand concepts, grading assignments—there’s a lot that goes on behind the scenes of professors’ lives.

One thing I’ve tried to bring to my classroom is games—specifically card games and board games. I’ve used a couple games made by other librarians/instructors, and I’ve made a couple of my own! I’m trying so hard to make MLA citations fun… it’s not something that’s easy to get students excited about.

Because I’ve been teaching, quilt work has taken a bit of a backseat. I need to get to work on my data quilt, though, because I am presenting it at the ALA Annual Conference & Exhibition in June.

Here’s hoping for a glorious May. Stay well, friends.