Month: September 2026

DEALT naturally brings consequence into a poem: something happens, and now somebody has to live with what comes next. Debbie makes that wonderfully literal—a leap at a tilted fruit stand ends with a melon dealing the blow—while Diana takes the word back to its card-table roots. Lari gives us wind, fabric, beach, and grief, letting movement carry the scene before death enters it. Elsewhere, DEALT becomes fate, resignation, threat, or environmental consequence. This week’s movement theme shows up both in bodies actually moving and in the harder kind of movement: the moment when circumstances shift and can’t simply be taken back.

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This week’s theme is movement, and today’s poems find it in several forms: getting up and starting again, running away, cutting and rinsing, restoring old objects, and even recognizing when movement itself needs to stop. B-lu gives us the most obvious physical motion with a breathless escape south, while Mark turns movement into daily renewal: survive the night, rise, rinse, repeat. Other poems work more subtly, using shifts in meaning or circumstance rather than literal travel. The nice thing about movement as a theme is that it doesn’t have to mean going somewhere—it can also mean changing, repeating, escaping, or knowing when to pause.

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FOCUS naturally pulls these poems toward attention—who has it, who loses it, and what happens next. Diana turns it inward during a panicked test; Lari needs it to survive a first mogul run; auntie jj redirects it toward a struggling ficus. This week’s seasonal challenge comes through especially clearly in Mark, where summer play gives way to “Fall is FOCUS time,” and more indirectly in Lari’s winter slope. Elsewhere, the word becomes pure zappai fuel: aliens require LOCUS FOCUS, while a dead frond garden suggests the toads have seriously neglected their one assigned job.

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This week we add movement. Bodies. Water. Wind. Travel. Leaving. Arriving. Falling. Rising. Staying still while everything else moves …

NIFTY is a cheerful little word, and today’s poems mostly use it with a wink. Diana turns it into dry sarcasm during a long train ride, Robo applies it improbably to a box containing a corpse, and Lari gives it the bright polish of a gift-catalog slogan. The seasonal prompt comes through most clearly in Mark and Mick: one gives us the movement of an outdoor fall game, while the other treats summer’s end as an excuse for one last slightly nutty outing. NIFTY may not sound especially poetic, but its casual optimism gives the poems something useful to play against.

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