Synkroniciti is honored to announce the winner of our Expectations Poetry Contest, “Aztec Herbology” by Maureen Tolman Flannery. This was a striking field of poems possessed with a depth I didn’t expect. Here are the twelve finalists, all of which are marvelous and insightful.
“Aztec Herbology” is one of those poems that can keep you up at night, its uncanny atmosphere opening into countless nooks and crannies of meaning. It explores the four causes the Aztecs of Central America recognized as vectors for illness and disease. Though they lacked the scientific tools we rely on today, they possessed a profound emotional and intuitive understanding of how suffering takes root—insight not into the mechanics of disease, but into how malaise spreads through the consciousness of individuals and society.
The final cause, the “loss of destiny,” considers how a person’s health can falter when they fail to realize the potential of who they are. What begins like a traveler’s guidebook to ancient medical practice—some of it decidedly dubious—gradually deepens into an exploration of what it means to be human. It is this last section of the three‑page tour‑de‑force that delivers the piece’s true force, though we are led there so deftly that it feels inevitable.
I’ll share more about “Aztec Herbology” in Maureen’s upcoming Artist Feature, including an excerpt.
Expectations is available for pre-order at Purchase Individual Issues – synkroniciti and will debut online on June 15, 2026.
Maureen Tolman Flannery is a Chicago poet raised in a Wyoming sheepranching family. She and Dan, her actor husband of fifty-seven years, have recently returned to Wyoming to rescue and restore three historic log cabins.
More than five hundred of her poems have been published in anthologies and literary reviews, among them: North American Review, Xavier Review, Winning Writers, BorderSenses, Wisconsin Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Santa Fe Literary Review, Calyx, Pedestal, and Atlanta Review.
Her latest book of poetry is Already Part of the Sky. Other volumes include Tunnel Into Morning, Destiny Whispers to the Beloved, and Snow and Roses about the White Rose resistance in Nazi Germany. She is currently adapting the Snow and Roses poems into a full-length theatre production.