My talented sister Allie painted this based on my poem “highway conversing.”

One of my favorite genre of writing is poetry!!! Up until a few years ago, I really didn’t enjoy reading or writing poetry because I had it stuck in my head that every stanza and line had to rhyme perfectly and that stressed me the heck out (props to you, Dr. Seuss). But during a creative writing class my senior year of high school, I fell in love with everything about poetry. The minute I had an idea, I found myself scribbling bits and pieces of poetry on anything I could get my hands on. Something as simple as a word or a phrase would get stuck in my head and I’d sprint to the nearest pad of paper (sometimes the back of a homework assignment- oops!) or the Notes app on my phone to write it down. Poetry is still challenging for me, but I find that the end result is always rewarding. Recently, I’ve been reading a lot of Rumi Kaur’s and Marina Keegan’s poetry. When I read their works I’m either speechless or running to the nearest available person yelling “YOU HAVE TO READ THIS RIGHT NOW!!!” because Kaur and Keegan are able to gracefully put emotions and experiences into words that many (including myself) have a hard time articulating. I think that’s the beauty of poetry.

Below is a poem I wrote about Allie and Adam. While I wrote this based on their relationship, after sharing it through a collaboration with Allie, I found that readers saw traces of their own relationships and experiences in this piece. It made me realize that we all read with a different lens. Our experiences shape the way we ingest words and craft the ones that slide off our fingers and onto paper. This is the poem that came to life through a simple conversation on a cloudy day during a road trip from Indiana to Ohio:

highway conversing.
I asked the man with the beard
to sketch me a life without her.
He smiled weakly and told me:

I sleep on dirt floors and bathe in foreign streams,
climb tall mountains and receive no relief,
move far away, let my hair grow to my feet.

In a deep green forest,
I search for silence just to hear the
falling of her breath during a cool night in August.

In gold frames and on the ceiling above where I sleep,
I paste her grocery lists and love letters,
fold them up,
her thoughts, I keep.

And when I am old and grey, he said,
when I have collected a shell from every coast,
and lined my walls with faceless shapes;
when my words are etched in marble
and a shore is in my name,
do not mistake…
when I have all of these things,
do not call,
for if I do not have her,

I will have nothing at all.

Thanks for reading! See you guys around.

p.s. Which poets/books of poetry have caught your eye recently? Comment below!!