About Me

The Nurse Poet

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I never meant to become a poet.  

 

I meant to become a lighthouse—steady, unflinching, a beacon for ships lost in the roil of human suffering. Nursing taught me otherwise. The body is not a harbor. It is a storm. A collapsing star. A language that speaks in codes of blood and tremor.  

 

I learned this years ago, holding the hand of a dying man who mistook me for his daughter. His grip was a confession: I’m afraid. I’m sorry. I don’t want to go. I hummed a hymn I didn’t believe in and watched his pulse unravel like a sentence left unfinished. That night, I wrote my first poem. It wasn’t art. It was a scream pressed into paper until my palms bled.  

 

The years wore on. I memorized the grammar of grief—the way a widow’s silence could clot a room, how a child’s fevered skin could feel like a psalm. I sutured wounds by day and sutured myself by night, stitching verbs into the gashes left by codes that wouldn’t shock back to life, mothers who begged me to fix it, and the relentless beep of machines that mistook existence for living.  

 

One winter, a woman with ovarian cancer handed me a jar of honey from her rooftop bees. “They make sweetness from endings,” she said. She died at 3 a.m. on a Thursday. I ate the honey slowly, spoon by spoon, and finally understood: poetry isn’t a cure. It’s the hive. The alchemy. The way we take what life shatters—love, loss, the 3 a.m. terror of being alive—and turn it into something that still, stubbornly, glows.  

 

So here I am. A nurse who writes sonnets with hands that smell of antiseptic and ink. A woman who’s learned to find God in the spaces between a heartbeat and its echo. My poems are not pretty. They are IV lines, bruise-purple and throbbing. They are the things I couldn’t say when my tongue was heavy with the weight of I’m sorry and I don’t know.  

 

This is my offering: not healing, but holy reckoning. Not answers, but a hand in the dark.  

 

You don’t have to call it poetry.  

Call it survival.  

Call it a love letter to the ghosts who made me.  

Call it the honey.