Month: September 2026

ASTER almost comes with the season built in. Asters are late-season flowers, so several poems naturally find themselves at that threshold where summer begins yielding to fall. Debbie’s guard walks through an aster bed at night; auntie jj brings one solitary bloom indoors beside soft sitar music; Lari gives the flower an amber snake for company. Other poets turn ASTER toward human comedy—Diana’s rejected bouquet ends up crushed, while Robo wears one in a dubious plaid lapel. It’s a good week for the seasonal challenge because nobody has to announce the season. The flower is already doing some of that work for them.

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DRYLY is an unusual constraint because it can describe both a physical condition and a human manner. Today’s poems exploit both. Debbie and Lari use it for deadpan delivery; Diana lets emotional news become more powerful precisely because it is shared without flourish. Mark takes the word outside, where clouds, drilling, dust, and scarce water put us squarely inside this week’s seasonal challenge—“The dust DRYLY smiles” makes drought both landscape and character. Auntie jj heads somewhere darker, finding dry humor in a crypt. Sometimes an adverb looks like a difficult constraint until the poems discover just how many kinds of dryness there are.

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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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