This week we add movement. Bodies. Water. Wind. Travel. Leaving. Arriving. Falling. Rising. Staying still while everything else moves …
Category: daily worku
12 September
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.
11 September
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.
10 September
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.