Pigmas 2022-23 4 January

[RiverNotch]

On the eleventh day of Christmas, the Pig Pen gave to me
eleven pretty numbers,
ten bloody sieges,
nine forged letters,
eight sweet loaves,
seven stray hoofprints,
six postgrad students,
five diamond rings,
four fairy tales,
three French towns,
two bare fists,
and a lampstand nearly all lit!



Today's the Synaxis of the Seventy Apostles, a Christian gathering in remembrance of the sending forth of the seventy apostles. Write about numbers.

[CRNDLSM]

A 50000 word book without
the most common letter
in the English language.
And I can't make a whole sentence.
Would you read Gadsby?
Or any other lipogram?
Not A Wake: A Dream Embodying 
(pi)'s Digits Fully for 10000 Decimals
when you must include the novelty
in the title, could it really be that good?

[TranquillityBase]

The Spark


1878:  Vera Zasulich, aged 29
brought down General Trepov
with a British Bulldog revolver,
fleeing to Switzerland
she lived on cigarettes and mustard
grew ragged and lean 
“a heretic…a shrewdly feminine mind
working by intuitive impulses and flashes”
translating Marx into Russian
arguing and flinging ashes
in every direction as she made her mosaics
of words for rebellious action.
Recognized early Lenin’s “bull dog bite”.
died of pneumonia in Petrograd at 70
as 1919 gave birth to the Red Terror.

“A curious person, 
and a curiously attractive one”
said Trotsky, who, aged 24, had received
some of those cigarette ashes
amid the smokey forum of a den 
where a tiny cabal of the hunted
gathered to debate the fate of a nation
of one hundred million.