Synkroniciti is excited to welcome back poet Margo Davis of Houston, Texas, with “tell me, one part of we, why” a devastating poem about the dissolution of a relationship. A finalist in our “Audacity” poetry contest, this piece embodies the courage it takes to face heartbreak without refuge or shelter. Margo strips feelings down to their bare essentials and engages in subtle word play, using assonance, alliteration and repetition to create the delicate, trembling music of loss.
“how has yes become no,/ let’s become/ we can’t, and we turn into/ you or me.”
She achieves a simplicity which is elegant, unguarded and breathtakingly vulnerable. Enjambment creates a sense of emotion, of difficulty in getting the words out. We collect our breath to get through one thought, then find ourselves sucked ahead into the next one. This is the way it feels when something we have counted on is broken, when we question our past, our present and our future.
The poem culminates in a plea to the beloved: “why go swiftly. show/ half a heart.”
The beloved has been coming to this breaking for some time, but the narrator is only now learning of it and needs time to process it, to understand, to catch up. But she’s out of time, the poem, like the relationship, is over and she’s left in the cold with no fire to warm her, only the afterglow of what no longer exists.
Read “tell me, one part of we, why” in Synkroniciti’s Audacity issue, Vol. 8, No. 1, available here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Margo Davis is elated her new collection, Uncoupling, is out. Prior poems have appeared in Notes of Light and Dark, The Ekphrastic Review & Verse Daily. Forthcoming ones are to appear in The Mackinaw Journal, The MacGuffin & Equinox.
April bodes well: Margo will be Writer in Residence at Hypatia-in-the-Woods in WA followed by two photos exhibiting in Barcelona’s Ph21 Gallery.
Pick up Uncoupling via Amazon, Thriftbooks or Bookshop.org.