It came again, this single day in April with its double whammy of cancerversaries: my initial diagnosis in 2013, brain metastases in 2015 (with lung mets that snuck in around September 2014). Eleven years with malignant melanoma in my life. Nine years with the creeping fear of brain tumors returning. My next scans aren’t for a couple of weeks. I could say I’m in that dodgy in-between phase that starts feeling heavier and heavier as scan day approaches, but to be honest, I don’t lose sleep over scans anymore. Scanxiety is in my rear view. At the risk of tempting fate, I just don’t feel I should worry. But it feels like a more informed nonchalance than the one I adopted in 2014, when I showed up ready to hear I was fine and got bad news.

What have I been up to? Working, mostly. But also, for the past few months, I’ve been taking a poetry workshop. My first one in about twenty years. It has been revelatory, difficult, and affirming to be in class with people from across the country, developing rapport and esprit de corps despite the great differences in our ages and lives, under the guidance of a marvelous poet and teacher (whom I just so happened to go to high school with, also).

I mean, I’m 52. I don’t have any illusions that I’ll make many waves in the poetry world. And the poetry world in the whole has been a pretty challenging and unwelcoming place since October 7. But I have really loved getting back into writing new poems, I feel empowered to revise old ones, and maybe I’ll finally break my unhelpful, longstanding moratorium on sending my work out to journals.

I have a new sense of how to get these things done, and it’s more about plugging away than intense bursts of creative energy. I am letting things marinate, sit around and age in my head a bit, before committing to paper. Hard for me to know if I’m learning something that comes naturally to other people, because what comes most naturally to me is seat-of-the-pants thinking and creating, usually under deadline.

And hey, it just so happens I have to write a ghazal by Thursday (in my defense, I have been thinking quite a bit about it). So enough navel gazing.