Synkroniciti is honored to welcome Thai Australian writer Paris Rosemont with two searing poems that confront the intertwined challenges of being creative and being female.
“Junkyard” draws a visceral parallel between the creative acts of birth and writing. Both require sacrifice and involve pain, and both can fail in ways that feel like personal undoing.
“I am out salvaging scraps from the junk-/ yard where I have been admitted for Dilation/ & Curettage to purge my miscarried poems./ (Dear Sensitivity Reader: before you get your knickers/ in a knot, I ask that you indulge me this parallel—/ I have lived experience of both kinds of losses.)
This bold poem explores the anguish of being unable to perform a function that feels essential to one’s identity. It captures the dread of creative barrenness, the shame of stalled expression, and the terror of not being able to manifest one’s own humanity. Paris’s vulnerability is audacious; she refuses to tidy the mess or sanitize the trauma. Instead, she demands that we witness the rot, the grief, and the stubborn will to keep salvaging meaning from the wreckage. The irony is that in embracing the ugliness, she has brought forth poetry.
“Sunshine, ” one of our Audacity poetry contest finalists, exposes the violence of a marriage in which the speaker is denied agency–in this case she wanted a puppy for herself and her children. The poem does not flinch from naming dehumanizing sexual coercion and psychological abuse.
“As the man/ of the house, you’d put your fist down/ on what you expected from our marriage./ Said my upbringing had been dysfunctional—/ thus, I was in no position to weigh in. Told me/ other husbands hit their wives, so/ I should be grateful you never raised/ a hand to strike me.”
But he did use those hands to inflict pain on the most vulnerable part of a woman’s body. By naming what was once endured in silence, Paris loosens the shame that abuse grafts onto its victims. She restores agency through articulation, refusing to let the abuser’s narrative stand uncontested.
Read Paris’s liberating poems in Synkroniciti’s Audacity issue, Vol. 8, No. 1, available here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Paris Rosemont is a multi-disciplinary, multi-award-winning Thai Australian writer, educator, and author of poetry collections Banana Girl (2023) and Barefoot Poetess (2025, WestWords) and chapbook >>glitch<< (2026, Incision Press). Widely published in a plethora of literary journals and anthologies including Australian Poetry Journal, Splinter, and Sky Island Journal, Paris was named winner of the Matthew Rocca Poetry Prize 2025 and received nominations for the Best of the Net 2025 and Pushcart Prize 2026. She is a critic for Mascara Literary Journal, Guest Editor for Written Off Literary Journal, and sits on the Hunter Writers’ Centre Board.
Paris is currently working on her debut novel Bruised Fruit, exploring diaspora, desire, and cultural inheritance. Find her at http://www.parisrosemont.com or Instagram @msparisrose.