coal, blue, neck, glow. + next week's words.

Dear Poets,

Both of us spend too much time missing writing--hurting unnecessarily seems both silly and perversely easy. When we show up here, we are coming back, shoring ourselves up, making ourselves well, moving our linguistic salt & pepper shakers around like The Girl With the Silver Eyes and trying to feel, again, like a breadbox full of numinous maracas. This week, that happened on Tuesday instead of Monday.

Stuff we loved from last week:


the burden in my belly that shines around my eyes     (coal)


she swathes her clothes around them
burnt biscuits on a minstrel's crown        (coal)


miners trapped, blotted, erased in the night
for fifty more years                                               (coal)


exhibit A for the type A: alchemical cliché      (coal)


the tone in my voice
when you turn away and leave          (blue)


the only colour of emotion you can sing              (blue)


loneliness folds itself into an origami penguin
and secrets itself into some little pocket inside          (blue)


a little rain must fall to feed the kudzu
or whatever else will take that damn house     (blue)


turned down under marble sky
warmth above the sheets
a serving spot for blessings                    (neck)


The last bowl to hold your kiss       (neck)


naked as my want, your stem       (neck)


a keyhole in the forest
or an alley
the light that moves your feet            (glow)


the face of a mother
beneath a stern lover's hand         (glow)


light between the liars' trees (glow {after Susan Briante})


So next week, we're drawing a creek and making it run. Please send your tiny poems of seven lines or less (to inkandfamine@gmail.com) on/ redefining these words:

creek             spoon          number          lightning   

And please leave us your comments & word suggestions here!

Love is it--

Ink and Famine