Notice what is here, right now—a person, an object, a sensation, a creature, a moment. Don’t use the word presence. Put us there.
Month: September 2026
19 September
WAKEN naturally gives a poem movement even when nobody physically goes anywhere. Today the motion is often a change of state: Debbie’s dull mind begins to stir, Robo crosses the boundary from a waxen dream landscape into waking, Mark activates yeast, and Mick waits for a caned night to loosen its grip. Robo’s poem is a particularly clean example of a haiku-like turn—the first two lines let us inhabit the dream, then “But now I WAKEN” closes the door on it. This week’s movement theme can be bodily, but today reminds us that waking itself is a journey.
18 September
SNOWY gives this round an immediate landscape, but the more interesting question is what the poets make move inside it. Diana’s poem does something especially neat with this week’s movement theme by taking movement away: “SNOWY roads cut off” suddenly explains the frantic cupboard search and traps the poem in place. Debbie moves in the opposite direction, drawing someone physically closer toward safety from the snowy night. Elsewhere we get falling stones, beach excursions, restless survival, and some unapologetic zappai weirdness. A movement poem doesn’t always have to travel very far—sometimes stopping the road is enough.
17 September
Some constraint words make you search for synonyms. THETA makes you search for an entire world where the word can plausibly live. Today those worlds include dreams, brainwaves, meditation, mathematics, Greek-letter societies, politics, and the movement of time itself. Lari takes perhaps the most natural route, putting THETA back into trigonometry, while Debbie and Diana turn it into brain-state weirdness. The week’s movement theme also appears in unexpected forms: zombie pursuit, crisscrossing waves, the settling of the mind, and even the absence of movement after death. With a word this specialized, getting it into the poem is only half the job; the real trick is finding somewhere it belongs.
16 September
WISPY naturally invites lightness, fragility, and things that barely hold their shape. Today that becomes hair, ghosts, lovers, curls, asparagus stems, and the faint residue of love itself. Robo and Mark lean toward haiku-like Worku, grounding the word in sensory scene and seasonal change, while auntie jj and Diana push it toward comic human behavior and parody. Lari gives us perhaps the most kinetic use of the week’s movement theme: sweat, plowing, and hard fieldwork contrasted with one tiny wispy curl. It’s a delicate word, but this group gives it plenty of motion.
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