Today’s Worku takes on PENAL, a painful constraint: stiff, bureaucratic, and not exactly overflowing with lyric music. The group generally handles it well by giving the word something vivid or comic to sentence—a dog in a fountain, a shoplifter on the run, an innocent pecan pie, or a bowling rivalry treated like a crime. Mick’s late entry takes the word in a darker direction: guards, leaden sky, and inmates slogging through sodden lanes make PENAL colony feel like the destination the whole poem has been walking toward. The constraint may be punishing, but several poems make the punishment fit.