Synkroniciti is delighted to welcome back Indian poet Ankita Sadarjoshi, who won our Dreams poetry contest last year. Audacity features “Birthday,” a taut and shimmering prose poem recounting a birthday night out at a bar, where a bouncer’s bold and insistent attention unsettles the evening’s celebratory atmosphere. Fresh from receiving a silk scarf that makes her feel stylish, our protagonist slips into an audacious persona that emboldens her even as it exposes her.
“After the scarf, still some five, six friends in the bar. Didn’t pay a dime that night. As we lit cigarettes outside, the bouncer named Angel got down on one knee, he hit the concrete, said marry me.”
The scarf becomes a kind of stand‑in self: a witness, a double, a fragile glamour she can’t quite control. Buoyed by tequila’s fire and the thrill of being seen, she entertains the attention longer than she normally would. The moment tilts when she asks what he wears around his neck.
“My brother’s ashes. A smile, I fawn a thing like pity, though kinder and pretty, thank him, shimmy silk-like back to friends, watching the scarf watch the bar swallow me.”
It is this abrupt brush with something intimate and grief drenched that punctures the spell. The buzz dies; the night folds in on itself. She returns to her friends, carrying unanswered questions and the faint aftertaste of a boundary crossed. Ankita captures the volatile chemistry of attention, vulnerability, and performative behavior with remarkable clarity, leaving us suspended in the charged quiet after an encounter that refuses resolution.
Read “Birthday” in Synkroniciti’s Audacity issue, Vol. 8, No. 1, available here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Ankita Sadarjoshi is a poet with an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia College Chicago. With a background in dramatic arts, her central focuses include experimenting with the formal constraints of poetry, blending theatre and language, and writing ekphrastically. She writes about beauty, damage, domestic rot, psychological unravel, desire, and place.
Her chapbook pink mortem was published by Bottlecap Press in December 2022. Her poems “sugarburn” and “The Kids Are Awry” have won Academy of American Poets Eileen Lannan Poetry Prizes.
She taught writing to college students in Chicago but now writes and resides in Bangalore.