Synkroniciti is excited to welcome poet Mike L. Nichols of Idaho with two stunning poems that explore the audacity of grief and vulnerability by exploring feelings and memories centering around his mother’s death when he was a teenager. Losing a parent at any age is difficult, but the liminal nature of adolescence makes the experience sharper and more formative.
“Going Away Party” describes a gathering held as his mother was dying so that relatives and friends could say goodbye, a difficult experience which he sought to escape by leaving the house to smoke a joint. Ultimately, he didn’t escape the situation, but she missed him and asked why he wasn’t there to hold her hand.
“And I have no satisfactory answer. It’s just that I was scared./ I was afraid the sight of her colorless body would/ overwhelm me. I couldn’t push through it.”
The guilt he feels is complex and it changes the way he relates to the world. There is an aching sense of regret here, that he wasn’t able to live up to her expectations in that moment, that he let the torch of filial love gutter out when she could have used its warmth. We want to say that it will be okay, but we understand this is not a thought that can be glibly whisked away. Mike’s vulnerability is shattering.
The second poem, “Thirty Six Snows” looks back at her death from thirty-six years later as he watches a blizzard at night. It is his turn to ask “where is my mother?”
“The snowflakes melt/ against my skin. I turn my/ hand, causing them to roll/ together, gathering mass until/ they drip down. And as each droplet/ splats on the ice below I feel/ not even a brief connection. ”
This numbness is devastating because it is universal. We have all felt the closing of the one‑way door of death, even if we believe in something beyond it.
Mike’s work is extraordinary and deeply visceral: the economy of language reveals his ability to distill a single moment until it becomes a world, a fragment containing eternity. His poems do not dramatize grief; they bear witness to its textures, its silences, its long aftershocks. He invites us to sit with our own losses, not to resolve them but to acknowledge them.
Read Mike’s vulnerable poems in Synkroniciti’s Audacity issue, Vol. 8, No. 1, available here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Mike L. Nichols is a graduate of Idaho State University and a recipient of the Ford Swetnam Poetry Prize. He is also the author of the chapbook Dead Girl Dancing. Look for his poetry in Rogue Agent, Sheepshead Review, Sierra Nevada Review, Plainsongs Magazine, and elsewhere. Find more at deadgirldancing.net.