Overnight in my room
I became an apple.
I pressed my can to the wall
because my neighbor played viola
and someone was running
the sweeper and someone else
blowing softly on an ember
in a nest of grass.
I became a bear then,
tied by the waist to the doorknob
with a length of cotton thread.
When the door popped open
it was morning and I became
a tooth, pocketed and walked
to the new room,
my old room’s double.
Everything looked the same
but I had new neighbors.
New noise.
One night I entered
in evening dress and left
as a mote, a slow shipwreck
against the plate glass
window, a splinter
in the organizer’s eye.
To each her own
modest balcony: a place
to get good at folding messages
into airplanes, aiming them
for another’s hand.
About the Poem:
During Covid lockdown, we watched a lot of documentaries. One of them was A Trip to Infinity – interviews with cosmologists, particle physicists, and mathematicians. The discombobulating and captivating infinite hotel paradox was discussed – it’s a thought experiment designed to help our little brains understand the concept of infinity. Basically, imagine a fully occupied hotel with infinite rooms – even when full, if everyone shifts down a room, there’s space to add one more. I think an infinite number of poems could come from imagining what’s going on in those rooms!
About the Poet:
Zoë Ryder White’s first full-length collection, The Visible Field, is forthcoming from River River Books in early 2026. A chapbook, Via Post, was a finalist for Tupelo Press’ Snowbound Chapbook award and won the Sixth Finch chapbook contest in 2022. HYPERSPACE was the editors’ choice pick for the Verse Tomaž Šalamun Prize in 2020 and is available from Factory Hollow Press. She co-authored A Study in Spring (Rabbit Catastrophe Press, 2015) and Elsewhere (Sixth Finch Press, 2020) with Nicole Callihan. Her poems have appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Iterant, Plume, and Threepenny Review, among others. A former elementary school teacher, she edits books for educators about the craft of teaching. She lives in New York’s Hudson Valley with her family.
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