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Fay Dillof
1.
Remember The Twilight Zone episode
in which a couple tries to escape town on a train
that loops them back to the same station?

Like that, there are tracks in my brain.


2.
Halted on the highway,
my friend Amy says We're not in traffic,
we are traffic.


3.
I try not to look at the man in the park, doing pull-ups
on the limb of a tree. Sweaty,
bare-chested—he's always there.

Not that it's always the same guy.
Or the same poor tree.


4.
My father's cousin, when he still could speak,
asked How big is your now?
but I was already looking back on the moment

from some sad future.


5.
The gratitude journal I keep by my bed is empty
because every night it's the same:
trees.


6.
In the final reveal, the couple is trapped
in an endless game
being played by a giant child.


7.
Well, at least she never stopped
trying, my gravestone might read.


8.
When I say soul,
I mean like a photobooth photo—
quick this, this, this, oh, this.
from the book BEST NEW POETS 2022 / University of Virginia Press 
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Titles are usually a struggle for me but "Little Infinities" came to me right at the start and, after that, coming up with examples was so much fun I felt I could keep going and going—another little infinity! That I was actually writing about the opposite—about the briefness of time/life—didn’t hit me until I was halfway in.

Fay Dillof on "Little Infinities"
Color headshot of poet Jorie Graham
"Short Conversations with Poets: Jorie Graham"

"A poem is alive; it uses you to get itself written, spoken, to get its wisdom to cross from the unknown into the known. From the not-yet-experienced, into experience. And its primary current, to do all this, is formal—which involves syntax, rhythm, stanza, line, enjambment, rhyme-likeness, silence. At any rate, form is the locus of music, which is that other face of the mystery: what moves, what persuades, what makes an idea be felt, a sensation feel true, a discovery feel like a revelation—"

via MCSWEENEY'S
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Cover image of the cover of Laila Malik's book, archipelago
What Sparks Poetry:
Laila Malik on "the organic properties of sand"

"In the petroleum economies of al Khaleej (as elsewhere), there exist micro-universes of so-called expats, a blossoming confusion of recent arrivals and longstanding, multi-generational clans, the newly affluent and then those others who live at the porous boundaries of the less desirable micro-universe of outsiders, migrant workers."
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This April, to celebrate National Poetry Month, we'll share popular writing prompts from our "What Sparks Poetry" essay series each morning. Write along with us!
 
The word farolita refers to a small lantern in Spanish, while farolito refers to luminaria, the Christmas lanterns consisting of a candle or votive placed inside a paper bag with sand. Compose a poem that follows the motions of light emanating from a small source, animate or inanimate: a firefly, a reading lamp, a night light, or algae, for instance. In the poem, connect the source of light to a human relationship and explore the valences of this-that-or-the-other. How are we connected, you and I? What light shines through us?
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