dance, honey, blood, rule. + next round o' words.

Lexiphiles, we salute you! Missed you last week; there was some traveling going on, both mental & corporeal. We'll be back on schedule with every-Monday postings next week.

We love the response we got to this group of words. Here are some of our picks from a whole juicy two weeks' worth of submissions:


abandon back story
choose body               (dance)


the key in the lock
peach pit
a fire you cannot put out      (dance)


when two trunks
mine & yours
kiss bark
& entangle root    (dance)


honeyed words
and the blood and guts of our lives
thrusts us into past and future
regrets and fears                                 (dance)


practice of being present in the moment    (dance)


the touch of the devil
on the tip of your soul       (dance)


a salacious heel turn
in the beat of traffic
two fold                      (dance)


leather fold in the master's keep
hoof & bit
hot body turning under weight & pull            (dance)


killing a lover
in the midst of a sonata          (dance)


i
don't       (dance)


brow sweat & tear
licked from chalice lip          (honey)


the earth pot in which
a small child holds his endless swim        (honey)


a ground dance
leading northwest
to the door of the soothsayer           (honey)


the still dance of a toothed butterfly
sharpened, polished
on a wizard's cane                                  (honey)


I love you
I miss you
come find me        (honey)


perfume of a female beast
wetting her palms
staining her bone white teeth       (blood)


a made sacrifice
for one more wing
one more wish                  (blood)


a bridge between calf
& ankle
sisters forever                  (blood)


liquid, solid
binds us all
despite the shame        (blood)


quick to mix with water
and confuse the issue             (blood)


from bowl cap to knee bone
a stagnant fire
that holds up the dance          (blood)


leaving behind the rolling cassocks
small white blossom
in the bosom of a dead man's hand         (blood)


it seemed so simple
red dots
red line
red pool         (blood)


when the caterpillar refuses the light
& the air
& dines in darkness on his feet                  (rule)


blue silk curtain
dividing chanteuse from song           (rule)


not an implicit understanding
you got to carve it into stone
for it to be a rule                         (rule)


bottle cap, rusted
leaning on the sill
where feasts used to cool
in the Kansas heat                  (rule)


you make a box
you live in a box
you cherish the box
the box falls apart             (rule)


my chisel wasn't sharp enough      (rule)


& this time, we got two poems that use or encompass all four words:


Do they still dance to Haydn's Symphony No. 43
in Hungary, like honey never decomposing
but fermenting, or like ephemeral eagle's
blood in the fog of Haydn's Symphony No. 88?
Who rules in the essence of his ether?


you with your hips
me with no boundaries


Yowza.

So, next weeks' words are

matchstick      tower      sacred      volcano

Send your poems of seven lines or less, re-imagining or defining these words, to inkandfamine@gmail.com. And please, if you are waving your hand in the virtual air because you've got your heart set on seeing a particular word undergo this collaborative poetic transformation, leave us a comment below!

O happy day, calloo, callay--

Ink and Famine

creek, spoon, number, lightning. + next week's words.

When you think of the brain as a collection of tiny storms, do you ever wonder how climates are changing up there inside our skulls?

We had some gorgeous, some surprising, & some silly submissions this week. Hurrah! Please, keep 'em coming!


fill my head with creek
drown words                       (creek)


walking to the sound of creek
I miss my sarong falling
silently to the ground                    (creek)


the wet moat body
that once did not chase its own tail        (creek)


I saw an alligator
they shot it                 (creek)


the perpetual robes of the plum goddess
at once rise, bloom, decay and drop              (creek)


fire has mercy on the red dog's bridge         (creek)


Just a jump
and swing
and a hope for no water          (creek)


my round face
mooned into a metal sky             (spoon)


sound of fiddle in the flooded road     (spoon)


Bosphorus of throat     (spoon)


spoon, spoon
spoonspoonspoonspoon
spoon                                  (yep, you guessed it)


if math is God
numbers are Jesus
and 23 is the sermon on the mount       (number)


the exhausted catalog
of star catching
on my favorite night         (number)


piano cemented to the floor, drunken children
dinging upon it as if it were a telephone                     (number)


metal arm jerking green into the dance           (lightning)


hot pin prick
tattoo of a sponge in the petrified earth         (lightning)


atmospheric candle
constantly flickering off.             (lightning)


heads of diamond ache easy            (lightning)


One poet sent us a poem that makes use of all four words:


Creek, heavy with sleep,
a tongue tied spoon at the end of her limb,
she tries to number the badlands.

Let it be

late night lightning.


We're itching to see more of your work. & your friends' creations too. If you've submitted but haven't seen your poems up yet, keep writing & keep sending! A new dictionary ain't like the OED--it needs a near-infinite number of contributors, so please share this blog.

For next week, we eagerly await your explorations of

dance        honey        blood        rule

Send poems to inkandfamine@gmail.com! & offer suggestions for words in the comment section.

Happy August,

Ink and Famine