1.Remember The Twilight Zone episodein which a couple tries to escape town on a trainthat 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-upson 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 momentfrom some sad future. 5.The gratitude journal I keep by my bed is emptybecause every night its the same:trees. 6.In the final reveal, the couple is trappedin an endless gamebeing played by a giant child. 7.Well, at least she never stoppedtrying, my gravestone might read. 8.When I say soul,I mean like a photobooth photo—quick this, this, this, oh, this.
Little Infinities
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- April 14, 2023
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“Little Infinities” from BEST NEW POETS 2022: 50 POEMS FROM EMERGIING WRITERS.
Published by Samovar Press/Meridian on January 9, 2023.
Copyright © 2022 by Fay Dillof.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Fay Dillof’s poetry has appeared in Best New Poets 2022, Gettysburg Review, Ploughshares, New Ohio Review, Field, Spillway, Rattle, Green Mountains Review, and elsewhere. She has been awarded the Milton Kessler Memorial Prize and the Dogwood Literary Prize, and received support from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, and The Adirondacks Center for Writing. Fay lives with her husband and daughter in Northern California where she works as a psychotherapist.
Entering its eighteenth year, Best New Poets has established itself as a crucial venue for rising poets and a valuable resource for poetry lovers. The only publication of its kind, this annual anthology is made up exclusively of work by writers who have not yet published a full-length book. The poems included in this eclectic sampling represent the best from the many that have been nominated by the country's top literary magazines and writing programs as well as some two thousand additional poems submitted through an open online competition. The work of the fifty writers represented here provides the best perspective available on the continuing vitality of poetry as it is being practiced today.
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