Get an original poem mailed to you every month of the year, for only $5 a month.
Ever since I was little, I loved checking the mail. We lived a mile up a dead end road on a meandering mountainside. Not the type of mountain with a vista, but the kind that rises and falls, requiring snow tires, or better yet, chains, to make it home in the snow. Much of the winter, we, who couldn’t always afford snow tires, had to park at the bank downtown and walk that mile up, up, up, through the falling snow and the dark shadows of trees, until we made it home.
We had a sandy driveway that loved to armor itself in ice, and at the end of that driveway, left on the road, down about a hundred steps, was a rusty black mail box. It was our mail box, and it didn’t matter if the temperature was freezing, or rain was falling, my greatest joy of adolescence was checking that mail box. I’d run out in pajamas and bare-foot, tiptoeing over the ice, shivering against the sleet, to check the mail.
Mostly, it was ads and bills and nonsense, but every now and then, a magazine would appear with my name on it (thanks grandma). Even better, a letter from my friend Sam.
Mail is magic.
Poetry is magic, too.
I started this mail club, sending poetry via postcards to my friends, because I believe that poetry is essential to all people. Not just the people that are drawn to poetry, but to every person. Poetry is the practice of presence in one’s own life. It doesn’t matter if you’re reading it or writing it, poetry is prayer. It is meditation. It is a low utterance of the deeper self.
I want my friends to feel the same joy I felt as a child, opening the mail box in the cold heart of a New England winter, bare-foot and alive, to find a letter. Words from a friend. A break from the loneliness. Connection. Hope. I want poetry in the hands of mail carriers. In the hands of my friends.
I hope you’ll consider joining my mail club. Your subscription fee covers the cost of printing the post cards, postage, and offers me a tiny portion towards my work as a poet, which allows me to prioritize my art and pursue growth.
If you do decide to join, thank you. I can’t wait to share this mail magic with you.
Meet you at the box,
Sarina
sarina r michel 