I still remember the first day I actually identified as a poet. September 11, 2020. I had entered a local poetry contest and there was a reading. Still wearing a mask to keep the dreaded COVID-19 at bay, I attended with my then husband. The poem I read that night was prophetic, but the sticker the organization gave me to wear with my name badge was even more so.

It said, quite simply: “Poet”.

And when I put it on, I didn’t feel like an impostor.

I’ve read a lot of my poems in public since then. I’ve read other people’s poems in public, too. No matter what I do, I know I am a poet. Maybe we are all poets at heart, so maybe I’m not that special, but I have fully embraced being a poet.

Today is National Poets’ Day. It seems an appropriate day to share the news of my latest poetry book, Unwelcome Souvenirs. I’m very proud of this book. It has more than ninety poems in it, including many of the fortune cookie poems I wrote last April for National Poetry Month.

As a very important aside, my daughter also published her first poetry book this week. This was not planned. We finished them close to the same time, and when she told me hers was ready, I thought about how we used to get hiccups at the same time when she was a baby.

Just so you know I am not an impostor poet, I will share the last poem from the “Broken Things” portion of my book:

Just the Heart
By Michelle Garren-Flye

just the heart
that's all that's left
after all the acid rain
and all the cleansing pain
washed everything else away

just the heart left
on a simple pedestal
i let the rest of it go
(not without a fight though.)
I'll plant it now, see what grows.