Category: poems

8 September

Posted on September 9, 2026 By admin

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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7 September

Posted on September 8, 2026 By admin

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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6 September

Posted on September 8, 2026 By admin

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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5 September

Posted on September 7, 2026 By admin

SOUPY sounds like a simple adjective, but today’s poems show how many jobs it can do: describe a ruined pile of leaves, an August night thick with humidity, a disastrous lunch, unappetizing gruel—or even become Soupy Sales. That range sends the group across all three Worku neighborhoods. Diana and Debbie lean toward haiku-like Worku, grounding SOUPY in weather and physical aftermath, while auntie jj, Lari, Mark, and Mick exploit its comic possibilities in zappai-like Worku. Sometimes a constraint word doesn’t need elegance. Sometimes its very ungainliness is what makes everybody play.

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4 September

Posted on September 5, 2026 By admin

WAGER naturally wants a prediction: somebody believes something will happen and puts a little confidence behind it. That gives today’s poems a useful built-in turn. Robo bets on a faltering pacer, Lari scans a wheat field and wagers against cranes, and Diana uses the word for something much more human: one glimpse of a raspy-voiced doll maker in a dark curio shop and she’s willing to bet there are cats somewhere nearby. Debbie’s late entry pushes the round further into zappai-like Worku—bee sting, gourd, rager, pager, then the exhausted conclusion “WAGER my mind gone.” Mick joins that comic chaos with a toad on a rager who is almost certainly going to pay for it. Sometimes the constraint doesn’t just finish the poem; it gives the speaker a reason to make a prediction in the first place.

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