30 Poems in November 2025

Well, I did it! I drafted 30 poems in 30 days, and I met my fundraising goal of $300+ to support free English classes at the Center for New Americans! I could not have done it without my wonderful donors, the encouragement and daily prompt emails from Nerissa Nields, and the community of other writers I felt around me as I held space each day, usually over breakfast or a sometimes with a nightcap, to collaborate with my unconscious and see what surprising word combinations we could playfully craft.

Here’s my poem from Day 23, based on A Center by Ha Jin.

As Daylight Wanes

Rise in the quiet, dark morning.

Do only what’s necessary.

If someone calls you obsessive or a flake,

Let them go on misunderstanding.

If another praises your achievements,

Don’t rest on that—but hold it close.

Only your own heart is a lasting friend.  

Stay awake in the long, dark evening.

Don’t go to bed without a song.

If you can’t imagine the sap

Coursing through the nearby maple,

Trust that as years go on and on and on,

When you become older than your mother

Ever was, the wisdom of heartwood

Will come to you in Dreams. 

Image made by Smith College student Diana M. for this fundraiser.

Who’s Who in “Black Socks and Bouquet”?

My debut poetry chapbook, Love Letters to Ghosts, was published last month! It’s available for sale via online retailers including Bookshop.org or directly from me. What I’m writing about today is the beautiful cover image, why I chose it, what I see in it. 

When I learned that my publisher, Meat for Tea, was open to writers selecting their cover art, I really wanted to use something by my friend and collaborator, Lauren Kindle. I love the vibrancy, joy, and colorful contemplation of her paintings, collages, and drawings. She even has some that depict letter-writing, either with a figure in the act of writing or with a piece of mail as an object in a still life. 

As I looked through Lauren’s online portfolio, I found many beautiful maybes. Then I saw a monotype called “Black Socks and Bouquet” and I knew it was the one. 

Two human figures, depicted gently with just a few strokes of black ink, gaze at one another across a gray distance. The person in the background has just stepped through an arched doorway. They hold an outrageously large bouquet of flowers, bright and radiant in the gloom. The foreground figure seems ready to move out of the space, with one shoulder obscured by a curtain or doorway, but she is looking over her other shoulder toward the flower-bearer as if suddenly captivated.

Who, in this picture, is the lover, and who is the beloved? Who is the letter-writer, and who is the ghost? 

What captivates me is the power of the connection between the two figures, as shown in their locked gazes and the way their bodies are turned toward one another, combined with the atmospheric magic created by the monotype method. The texture and tonality of the ink gives the image a surreal quality, while the few spots of color sing out in surprise.

I imagine that the foregrounded figure is remembering or dreaming of someone bringing her a (real or metaphorical) bunch of flowers. If that’s what’s happening, then the person with the bouquet is the “ghost” who lives in memory or imagination. But the opposite could also be true; maybe the person with the flowers is the dreamer/rememberer, and the person hovering on the edge of the frame is the ineffable one being wooed with flowers into lingering a little longer. 

Either way, I revel in the ambiguity. 

The poems in Love Letters to Ghosts make both kinds of movements. Some of them are based on sweet (or bittersweet memories) of a person who once brought me flowers and called me their beloved. Through those poems, I look back at people over my shoulder as I move into another space. 

Other poems were written to the receding “ghosts” of my younger self: the dream of becoming an astronaut or a painter, the dream of a world where it’s easy for people to get along. By writing about them I am asking them to linger a while longer, even as I know they have to leave, no matter how big a bouquet I offer them. 

A Note on the Title

My book title was influenced by the work of Carolyn Cushing, who proposes writing love letters to the dead to “keep up the loving flow,” and by Janet MacFadyen, whose poetry book Love Letters to the Wild is forthcoming in 2025 from Dos Madres Press.  

Poem of Sadness and Horror

It feels to me that hope for a ceasefire in Gaza is shrinking every day. People of conscience are still advocating for it, and I was relieved to read in the Guardian’s email newsletter this morning that “the US withheld about 3,500 bombs owing to concerns that they would fuel killing in Rafah.” I am glad for this incremental change, although it’s a tiny step in a much larger, more confounding horror.  

Recently I shared a poem about the world I’d like to see more of in the Middle East and everywhere. Today I’m sharing the other poem I wrote at the invitation of a friend who was sending them as an anti-war action to our congressperson’s office. It’s a poem of horror, sadness, mourning. It grew out of a prompt in a writing workshop to inhabit the body of a character. One of the characters I’m exploring in a new manuscript is Lot’s wife from the Old Testament. Someone else in the workshop had shared earlier an essay that meditated on salt, which gave me the idea of writing in the voice of Lot’s wife after she was turned into a pillar of salt.

You can see her on the left side of this painting, looking at the burning city. Not only is she unnamed in the story, she's not included in the title of this image or many others in which she's depicted.

De vlucht van Lot en zijn dochters uit Sodom (The flight of Lot and his daughters from Sodom)

When looking for a poem to respond to the war in Gaza, I settled on this one, with its connection to the sadly perennial acts of violence documented in the scriptures and stories of our Abrahamic religions. Posting it here feels about as useful as shouting into a thunderstorm. But, as Sharon Olds wrote about a different type of violence, “Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.”  

 

When I Became Salt 

 

The god made  

in my husband’s image 

wanted to destroy the city 

in peace. He could feel me 

watching, couldn’t stand it, 

calcified my mother-grief. 

 

My caring was welcome  

in our city with its wells and 

trees, but I was pillared  

to salt for turning to witness  

the price of my family’s  

freedom. 

 

Turn me to salt if I forget. 

 

I am sister to Daphne 

the laurel tree, disobedient, 

punished by desire. Like salt we are 

essential yet dangerous, treasured  

and feared, savored 

but scorned. 

 

Some said, “It was better 

to be enslaved in Egypt ...”  

I say: It was better to sin in the city  

than to immolate daughters,  

sons, grandchildren  

in the desert. 

 

Turn me to salt if I forget. 

 

 

Poem for Peace in the Middle East

It’s a beautiful sunny morning here in Easthampton. The birds are singing and the daffodils are blooming. Soon I will make toast and eggs for breakfast. Earlier when my dog woke me up to take her out, the sky was just turning from black to a bright greenish blue in the east and one robin was trilling a mellifluous aria. 

My heart is heavy with ache and sadness at the latest round of military funding my government is sending to the Israeli government as they enact their unconscionable and horrific campaign against Palestinian humans in Gaza. No one with a heart and an open mind can actually, literally believe this war is only against the unconscionable and horrific acts of Hamas. The starving and orphaned children, the targeted aid workers, the families displaced with nowhere to go… it’s sickening. The holocaust by the Nazi government in Europe against Jewish people and other “undesirables” less than 100 years ago was also sickening, unconscionable, horrific. 

I heard a Jewish acquaintance reiterate recently that Israel is the place they knew they could go if everything else fell apart. And yet I also heard a Jewish friend affirm recently that her experience when she visited Israel was that Palestinians are forced to live in a system of apartheid even when there’s not an active war going on. 

This grim cycle of violence churns throughout history and casts a long shadow on the future. 

I feel like I’ve done all I can do. I called my representative. I sent emails and signed petitions for a ceasefire. I spoke twice at my city council meeting in support of the ceasefire resolution that recently passed and was sent to our Massachusetts congresspeople and to the U.S. president. At the invitation of a poet friend, I wrote a poem about the world I would like to see, instead of this one where my tax dollars fund bombs that destroy innocent people’s lives, families, and culture. 

The thought of writing something to speak to this moment of genocide in Palestine was overwhelming to me, so for guidance I thought about a positive memory of cross-cultural connection and, in terms of form, I took as a model another poem I wrote about encountering folks with whom I could barely communicate but who were guided by a sense of basic goodwill. 

Dove of Peace by Pablo Picasso

This is the poem I wrote about the type of world I’d like to see more of. 

Daybreak at the Red Sea

On the bus from Cairo 

to Dahab, we crossed

the Sinai peninsula, stopped

in the black night

at a roadside shack.

Bare bulbs illumined tables of food. 

Out back

was the real desert

& a sky rich with stars.

Mom said, If you don’t know 

the word, just smile and point.

In the cafeteria

my first semester at college

we were

Muslim, Jewish, Christian,

Hindu, lesbian, bisexual

all eating tater tots

& sharing. Unlike

elsewhere, our singularities

didn’t divide us.

Dad said, Every soldier is someone’s 

cousin. I will not fight them.

At the guesthouse

a deck of cards was enough

to make friends.