Synkroniciti is pleased to welcome back Houstonian poet L.A. Merrill with “Siblings,” a poem about found family and moments of connection with strangers. Many of us are not lucky with our biological family, or perhaps we simply enjoy building new relationships and finding common ground with others. In two stanzas, L.A. shows us two such connections. The first happens at a Dickens-themed event, a woman passing by in costume as a suffragette looks her in the eye and something unspoken is shared. “I feel her connect with me/ more than any of us can set foot/ in a Dickensian setting here portrayed.” The second happens in the chemo/hematology ward, as she acknowledges “a butch woman/ in a sea of straights/ as she cradles a huge/ bouquet of pink roses” for her wife. If you’ve ever dealt with cancer or anemia, you know the joy of that moment when a person crosses the line back to wellness, their disease beaten back, crisis averted. It connects us, marks us as community, as family by virtue of our shared experience. L.A.’s poetry is simple and clean, powerful by virtue of the distilled episodes of connection she describes. She closes our “Family” issue with a sincere desire to extend the meaning of family for our modern age.
Read “Siblings” in Synkroniciti’s “Family” issue, available here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
L.A. Merrill was a juried poet for the 2017 Houston Poetry Fest. She was a featured reader for the Poetry Fix series in 2018 and for Gulf Coast Poets in 2019. She emceed Public Poetry’s virtual readings in 2020 and 2021 and has hosted other literary events. In 2021, Merrill won a Rowan Foundation scholarship to the Boldface Conference for Emerging Writers. She is a poetry editor for table//FEAST literary magazine. Her poems have appeared in the Texas Poetry Calendar, Equinox, and other publications. A poem of hers appeared in the 2021 bird-themed issue of Synkroniciti. The poet says that birds have continued to sing near her home and in her poems.