Noise. Music. Voices. Silence. Something heard—or something conspicuously absent. You don’t have to write “Sound.” Let us hear something.
Month: August 2026
30 August
INTEL naturally pushes Worku toward secrets, evidence, suspicion, and things we may—or may not—believe. That makes today’s group largely senryu-like, with human deception and judgment doing much of the work. Diana questions a smuggler’s information, Robo plants a false trail, and auntie jj turns a staged fight and stained rug into a miniature solved case. Mark and Lari veer toward zappai-like Worku, where intelligence becomes an excuse for grotesque food and comic forensic deduction. Mick takes the quieter route: a spy is buried with grief, shame, and finally his INTEL. Today the information matters, but whether we can trust it matters even more.
29 August
Today’s BLOOD set leans heavily toward senryu-like Worku: human danger, memory, regret, longing, and social connection. Lari uses BLOOD figuratively, turning friendship into chosen family; Diana and auntie jj move toward menace and violence; Mark keeps the focus inward, on regret and sadness. Mick takes the outlier route into zappai-like Worku, where literary parody and absurdity drive the poem. Same word, very different poetic neighborhoods.
28 August
Today’s Worku lands on TWEEN, a word that already carries a whole stage of life inside it: not quite child, not quite teenager, and often very aware of the awkward territory between. Several poems lean directly into that attitude. Debbie turns TWEEN into an insult, auntie jj gives us the classic eye-rolling adolescent rejecting the witches around her, and Lari drops us straight into a tween’s video-game world. Mick takes a different route, using the word almost as a stage of development: CHEEP becomes TWEET, the young bird grows, and the final TWEEN sits naturally between chick and flight. Sometimes a constraint works best when the poem discovers that the word itself already contains a transition.
27 August
Today’s Worku gives us UNCUT, a word that can mean unedited, untrimmed, uncensored, or physically untouched. That flexibility lets the poems move in very different directions. Mark takes the literal route, where fallen hair makes “No longer UNCUT” inevitable. Auntie jj gets a sharper turn by letting the snake shed while the film remains UNCUT. And Mick turns the word into a barnyard rallying cry, with roosters refusing the fate implied by yesterday’s CAPON. The best entries today don’t just use UNCUT as a description—they make the poem hinge on what has, or hasn’t, been cut.