matchstick, tower, sacred, volcano + next week's words

It’s been quite the end to summer! Hurricanes, caravaning cross country, getting lost in the deserts and forests that surround us; looks like we set down our hatbox of undefined words and took to the air, feeling the feathers pull from our hide.  A much needed apology for allowing a longer than desired hiatus, but the mind is often in need of the intake of new air before it is allowed to spout out new words.  And with that, here is what we pulled down out of the ether...

Your love, a sacred volcano
towering in this old heart
like matchstick voodoo.    (all inclusive!)

letting go of the statue’s hand

a ring of ash whispered into your palm     (matchstick)

young slave watering the gardens of
Babylon, city of closed arms                (matchstick)

when little flame

stilted her house

to keep the waves away            (matchstick)

that single, delicate hair on your hardening nipple         (matchstick)

 

anyone who really looks you in the eye
is beautiful               (matchstick)


Vanzetti said
                       I am innocent
and sat down in the deathchair             (matchstick)

the god
needing something
stands up                  (tower)

the watch point

the base keep

where my hair is all locked up                  (tower)

edifice built of countless scraps of paper
covered in words borrowed from unheard songs       (tower)

 

prism of your plasma

wanting to flow into mine

juices together

pulpy, sweet          (tower)

soul, don't go
one face turns to another so seamlessly
identity drops like a silk dress          (tower)


listening to a heartbreak song
with one you plead silent
not to break your heart            (tower)

a coin taken from a well

your wish in my pocket         (sacred)

everywhere you step
someone's bed
someone's altar       (sacred)

some stranger's breath stirs my dust      (sacred)

 

tears from Guadalupe

around my neck

one clear word

strung after another            (sacred)

the composer says goodbye to his earthly body
with two hands
the painter with one            (sacred)


what flows between the me
in the bed and the me traveling
in pictures of grief            (sacred)


from branch to brick, this town
is made of women
women's souls hush this place and keep
what water is left
running uphill               (sacred)
 

you still drink the explosion       (volcano)

natural bad luck
a peacock feather's eye on the wall         (volcano)

red birds rise toward home        (volcano)

her ruby lips

blow you down

there’s that “L” word again         (volcano)


long demon tongue
lapping hard at the wet sky        (volcano)

smear of ash
on a dignitary's tablecloth              (volcano)

We hope that these words find you well with the earth cooling off, the scent of soil and changing leaves promising the turn of the season.  If you would so please, we would love to hear how you would define-

carapace    mandrake     caravan       apothecary

Please submit your poems to inkandfamine@gmail.com.  And if you have any suggestions for words you would like to see redefined, please post them in the comments down below.  See everybody next week!

Yours in sonnets, haiku & even a little bit of iambic pentameter:

Ink&Famine 

 

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

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 

Novel, button, broomstick, cave + next week's words

Hello, hello, fellow poets and word admirers.  It's been another week and we have just a few more words to add to our new dictionary...redefining the world, one word at a time.  It's risky business.  Just look at how words affect the world around us...to see the world differently with the addition of an adjective.  To hear voices once quelled speaking out in the darkness, loud and clear.  The first understandable warbles from an infant's lips.  More lethal than the tip of the sword, the pen has always carried its own weight in the world.  Here are just a few samples of how we can see everyday objects in a new form, giving them a new voice:

bone tired desert
crooked spine
held by a hand beneath the tents
beneath the sheets
vowels & consonants falling thru fingers
like bits of black sand       (novel)

refusal to believe in time      (novel)

canopic jar   (novel)


door to secrets of the flesh   (button)

eight pupils of red thread
eight different ways to see a spell-
voodoo vision   (button)


greatest treasure of my tomb  (button)

pink dishes from a tea set
all up and down her belly  (button)

jumped over for love
gripped tightly for dust
smooth & thigh worn from flying over cityscapes  (broomstick)

not the only thing I'll put between my legs  (broomstick)

the tortured death
of the man who ate other men   (broomstick)


dark echo of the body   (cave)

barbaric yawp
of earth to ocean
hungry for salt water and sea urchins  (cave)

finger painted womb   (cave)

the city of your final destination  (cave)

empty, silly thing that shines when introduced out of the darkness   (cave)

And that's it for last week!  This week we have:

coal      blue      neck      glow

Please submit your poems of seven lines or less to inkandfamine@gmail.com.  We look forward to your submissions. Spread the word and leave a comment with suggestions for new words!



This is Ink&Famine signing off!

Miracle, Root, Saffron, Immigrant + Next Week's Words & Your Suggestions.

Hello again, poets! And so here we are again,  another week, another batch of words redefined and seen anew.  We hope you enjoy what we have in store for you and that you will continue to work with us on these definitions.  Without further ado.....

water falling all ten ways at once   (miracle)

the meeting of juice
and rind
tiny cathedral
open for the first time   (miracle)

the scent of you
a moon climbing my legs   (saffron)

taste of sunset
fleshed out in a beggar's bowl of rice   (saffron)

man thing
earth encrusted
prickled at the taste of rain    (root)

we reach pretty far to drink
even if we've always lived here   (root)

the one picture they have of us
we're not even in                          (root)

she who knows the moon upside-down
whistles a tune no one else can hear      (immigrant)

your thumb on my belly
traveling between knee-cap and nipple
hot breath on the back of your hand        (immigrant)


Don't forget to leave suggestions in the comments for future words to explore.  This week's picks are:

novel      button       broomstick       cave

See you next week, our imagimagnificent word folk!  And don't forget to submit your rhymes to inkandfamine@gmail.com.

Commas and semicolons,

Ink&Famine

Week Four: silence, shell, lily, road. Next week's words. And an invitation!

Poets, you're knocking us out. Here's a little sample of what you did with the words we posted last week:

the sound of hearts beating

when

words have failed.                     (silence)

Crumbled monuments of a time

remembered only in songs

now long gone unsung.                                   (silence)

the spaces of thought, between action.

the clearness of day between rain,

the angst of uneasiness                                 (silence)

The egg of air
between warm body
and wing-                                     (silence)

died on Thursday found on Tuesday
outside the circle of your old, ragged dance                                                                             (silence)

 

 

the hare who dips
the tips of his ears
in your winecup                             (silence)

 

 

a cicada song
crystallized on the trunk of the acacia tree-            (shell)

blue egg of the ancestral boat:
let's go home, you say
to the woman in the dream,
and sweep into your own ear.                           (shell)

Lady with her head bowed
singing you to her with her scent-             (lily)

pocket guide to a cloying romance                          (lily)

a dark sonnet
punctuated with headlights and weeds-            (road)

some nights: woods outside your door.
on others, a train, a room of winds and no sleep.                (road)

 

 

Thanks, all, for sending your stuff! Please, if you haven't seen your poems/ redefinitions here yet, keep sending! If you have, please send more! Send all poems to inkandfamine@gmail.com.

 

& if you're moved to do so, we'd love it if you'd leave us a comment with your own word suggestions.

 

Words for next week:

 

miracle      saffron      root      immigrant

 

Hasta,

 

Ink and Famine