Month: September 2026

BURST arrives already full of motion, so today’s poems use it to break something open: balloons, dreams, tears, music, summer itself. Diana’s first version particularly embraces this week’s seasonal challenge—an ordinary childhood trip suddenly “BURST into summer,” letting a few small details evoke an entire time of year. Mark finds season through fleeting morning warmth, while elsewhere BURST becomes slapstick, disappointment, emotional release, or pure sound. It’s a word that naturally wants a before and an after—which makes it especially useful for the turn a short poem needs.

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Today’s LIVEN set shows two very different ways the word can work. Several poems use it socially or comically—livening a restaurant, a mood, a scene, even a sleep machine. The seasonal theme gives the word another life entirely. Mark brings in the last melon and solstice, letting ripeness mark the turn of the year. Elsewhere, the poems lean into humor, advice, and surreal situations, showing how flexible LIVEN can be even when the seasonal prompt stays in the background.

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This week’s theme asks the poets to evoke a season, weather, or change in the natural world without simply naming the assignment, and today shows that the theme can sit alongside the constraint rather than govern every poem. Most of the group takes BLIND toward perception, confusion, or comic literalism. Auntie jj gives us a tactile reversal, where blindness changes rather than prevents reading; Debbie and Lari head into zappai-like absurdity. Mick most clearly takes up the seasonal challenge: summer is still physically present in the raised glass, but the final “BLIND march into fall” moves the poem across the threshold. The season isn’t explained. We’re simply carried into it.

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BEIGE may be one of the least dramatic words imaginable, which turns out to be exactly what makes it useful. Today’s poems repeatedly treat blandness as if it were a crisis: Debbie is more shocked by beige than by her amigo’s skirt, Diana considers exiling every other color, auntie jj stages an argument over whether something is merely “BEIGY,” and Mark dresses for the city in beige pants. Even the quieter poems find something strange in it—Robo drains dark ink into mute beige, while Mick turns an awkwardly arranged beige room into a tiny visual comedy. Some constraints arrive carrying drama. BEIGE makes the poets manufacture their own.

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Evoke a season, weather, or change in the natural world. You don’t have to write “season.” Put us inside one.