Synkroniciti is thrilled to welcome back writer, poet and visual artist Rachael Ikins of the Finger Lakes Region of New York. Rachael has published many poems, photos and artworks as well as several memoir pieces with us since 2019. She also won our cover contest for the “Belonging” issue. For Audacity, we feature a sparkling flash memoir, “The Plant Thief,” which details an audacious family activity passed down from generation to generation.
“All the women in my family—plant thieves. Summers, cold days the mothers piled kids in the car, drove into the hills seeking abandoned houses, weed-filled gardens. Broke in, no hesitation, for treasure behind and yes, garden gems wrapped in damp newspaper to carry home.”
Rachael opens with a whimsical memory: her mother waiting in her Cadillac while she dug wild daylilies from a farmer’s ditch. When the farmer approached on his tractor, she retreated back to the car in terror. She didn’t understand the impulse behind these small trespasses until she lost her home to bankruptcy. Only then did she recognize what her foremothers had known all along: a garden is sustenance, solace, and proof of survival. To plant something is to insist on a future. Those neglected, abandoned, unrecognized plants were blessings waiting for the right hands—and the right earth—to kindle them back to life, testament to a covenant between the earth and gardeners to sustain one another.
Rachael braids humor with empathy and deep humanity. As we laugh, we feel our world expand. She’s offering us our own nurturing inner garden, a creative space where we place the good things the universe sends our way. It is a generous vision far more inclusive and enduring than the capitalist ideals of profit and success. When the individual grows and blooms, the community is enriched, too.
Synkroniciti would like to dedicate this Artist Feature to Cato the cat, who passed away last week. “The Complicated Process of Coming Home,” which we published in our June 2021 issue on the theme of “Home,” told Cato’s story. Rest in peace, noble soul.
Read “The Plant Thief” in Synkroniciti’s “Audacity” issue, Vol. 8, No. 1, available here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Rachael Ikins followed her pen into the forest as a child. As with Gretel in the Grimm Brothers’ tale, a wicked witch forced her to reroute through valleys so dark she doubted the existence of the sun at times. She lost everything before she finally understood her truth: write like a motherfucker, write or die.
For poetry was the constant through all storms, the one beloved she refused to relinquish.
She won some prizes, published in journals and then books. This summer’s end she built a new knee of titanium and cobalt and evolved. Bionic poet. Author of her first novella which released at the same time, a thriller titled Haven (Raw Earth Ink.)
Her meal time companion is a 48 year old Thanksgiving cactus whose froth of hot pink rockets flies toward her so closely that she can hear them sing.