On Sunday night, a few days after May Day, under a just-past-full moon, I welcomed around 20 people into my home for the first installation of the Pomegranate Reading Series in nine years.

I spent all day Saturday and Sunday grocery shopping, cleaning the house, setting up the backyard with rows of chairs and connecting the string lights.

The reading featured my dear friends, fellow Women Who Submit, poets Ashaki M. Jackson, Lisa Eve Cheby, and Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo. Ashaki and Xochitl read at the first ever Pomegranate Reading in 2015. This was Lisa’s inaugural appearance.

Ashaki read powerful poems against pandemic erasure, taking us back to the terrifying days of 2020 that we’ve been encouraged to collectively forget. Lisa read poems from her own pandemic-themed chapbook Contact Tracing, continuing the call against forgetting. Xochitl read from her recently published craft chapbook An Interview With Fear, about Gettysburg, Asisstens Cemetery in Copenhagen, monuments vs. memorializing, grief and transformation. I also read some of my poetry recently published in New England Review, as well as a poem by my friend Mona Al Mashhawari, a 19 year old poet in Gaza caring for her family in the middle of the ongoing genocide. It was an evening of heavy subject matter, but held together by a sense of community and an affirmation of the values we want to live by. There was laughter, too, and brownies, and lively mingling.

The event doubled as a fundraiser for six families in Gaza that I have been campaigning for. Because of everyone’s generosity, we raised $240, which I divided up among the six families. They need so much more, of course, and sustained over time, but every little donation adds up, keeps the campaign active, and lets these families know that they have not been forgotten.

I started this reading series because I wanted to utilize my magical backyard and the shade of its lush fruit trees. Because I love hosting (in fact, I just read an excellent book about hosting called Having People Over by Chelsea Fagan). And because it feels important, necessary even, to make space to honor art and beauty, to connect with each other.