Synkroniciti is thrilled to welcome back poet Jeffrey Bryant of Los Angeles with two scintillating poems. “Terpsichore with her legs dangling over the balcony,” one of our “Audacity” poetry contest finalists, is a celebration of Queerness, performance and the audacity of becoming. Terpsichore, the Greek muse of dance, song, and ecstatic embodiment, presides over the scene from just out of sight as the poet shapeshifts his way through youth and desire. A wild party partners him with Nureyev’s Romeo and Garth Brooks, collapsing high art and honky‑tonk into a tumble of ecstasy that leads to a surreal awakening.
“I woke up/ that night under a follow spot,/ staring into an empty Broadway/ theater, the director shouting//”tell me about yourself!””
Jeffrey answers by trying on new selves, inhabiting archetypes, and letting glamour, dance, and Queerness illuminate his psyche. Cyd Charisse, Liza, and Halston are portals, embodied masks and archetypes that conceal as much as they reveal. His poem tumbles from scene to scene with dazzling courage, showing how imitation, fantasy and performance can become pathways to individuation. What emerges is a personal mythology that refuses smallness. Jeffrey reminds us that becoming oneself is often an act of theatrical bravery, requiring a willingness to step into the spotlight and own our fire.
The second poem, “Why is a word that should be set on fire —” confronts the challenges of living with a cancer diagnosis and creates resonant personal mythology for survival to replace the cancer ward clichés. “Why” becomes a question with no answer and no meaning, an exercise in empty rationalization and desperation.
“Why is the oncologist running away,/ turning around to see if I’m still there?// Why my right breast?/ Aren’t they both just as juicy/ as peaches freshly sliced?”
We feel the heat of Jeffrey’s rage, equal to his love for life and his delightfully wicked wit. His description of the cancer buffet is irreverent and refuses to become an inspirational metaphor or stoic musing on mortality. Instead, he exposes the violence done to his body with sarcasm and sensuality. This is gallows humor as survival instinct. The poem is punchy and relentless, using repetition to hammer home the truth: this is not a request for sympathy but a declaration of defiance that demands the reader’s witness.
Read Jeffrey’s fierce poetry in Synkroniciti’s Audacity issue, Vol. 8, No. 1, available here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Jeffrey Bryant is a multiple Pushcart-nominated queer poet from Los Angeles. His work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including the LA Weekly, LA Times, Poetic Diversity, New Verse News, Synkroniciti, Quill and Echo, Tension Literary, Journal of the Plague Years, Coiled Serpent, Altadena Literary Review, Shadowplay, Sparring with Beatnik Ghosts, Cholla Needles Literary Journal 101, Catching Fire from Three Rooms Press and Tender Hearts Club from Feather Press.
His collection The Catacombs of Vanished Lovers is out now from Cherry Pie Press.
Image by Alexis Rhone Fancher