I once pulled over on the side of a Utah road because I couldn't not.

A sprinkler had broken overnight and kept running, turning the whole scene into a fever dream—ice frozen on barbed wire, on grasses, on stems, on everything.

Accidental magic. Water doing the most mundane thing imaginable, caught mid-action by the cold and transformed into something I almost drove past.

I think it’s time to put some words to this and I’d love it if you did too.

Here are a few prompts that pair well with the images but feel free to choose your own adventure:

Something went wrong and made this. What other failures have you witnessed (or lived) that secretly transformed their surroundings?

Preservation as violence. Ice encases things. Those grasses and stems are still in there, perfectly held, suffocating. What does it mean to be preserved mid-gesture?

The witness problem. I stumbled across this. It wasn't made for me, wasn’t made at all really, and it would have melted whether I stopped or not. Write about the ethics or the luck of paying attention.

Infrastructure elegy. Wheel-line sprinklers are an older agricultural technology—a little obsolete, a little lonesome looking out there in a frozen field. There's something sad and beautiful about functional things that are slowly being left behind, still doing their job, no one really watching. Write the sprinkler’s biography, or the field’s.

The wrong season. A poem about things operating outside their intended conditions and what they accidentally became.

Drop yours in the comments when you're ready.

Tagging a few people who I think might enjoy: Sara Joy Tiberio Andy Smith Sarah Thompson Aaryn Venessa Tai Yeh Alix Klingenberg Poetry Outdoors Jodi Proctor Laura Catanzano JC .

Spread the love—tag others!