A few years ago, I was developing the creative for an annual event hosted by the agency I work at. It had a night sky theme, so I found myself down the rabbit hole of all sorts of starry and celestial writings, quotes, and poems.

Pale Blue Dot.

Van Gogh.

And then I found:

This wasn’t just something powerful to read in and of itself on some random weekday afternoon while I was sitting at my desk. Falling down the Nikita Gill rabbit hole led me on a whole new journey with poetry and towards so many contemporary poets that I have come to hold dear.

Morgan Harper Nicols. Brooke Solis. Seyda Noir. To name just a small few.

What started as finding individual poems of Gill’s here and there turned into buying her books, not just because what I had read so far I liked, but because one of her poetry collections is about fairytales and the other about goddesses. Mythical and archetypal stories that I already love so much, and with these collections, I get to watch someone else play with, disassemble, and reimagine them.

My phone is now full of screenshotted poetry. Me, a person who enjoyed the occasional assigned poetry reading in school, but never really sought it out. I thought I didn’t really like poetry… but now I think about how often reading Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein as a child continues to rise up in my psyche, and I have to admit that early poetry experiences may have been more formative than I once believed.

You never know when something that becomes so beloved to you might cross your path. Maybe on a weekday afternoon at your desk, maybe a poster in the library. Maybe sitting across a small table from someone with a tarot deck in one hand and an eclectic stack of books in the other, ready to read for you.