Synkroniciti is excited to welcome poet Joanne Durham, who resides in North Carolina, with two poems dealing with societal prejudice and exclusion, particularly in school systems. The masterful prose poem “Synagogue 1962,” one of our contest finalists, contrasts the sense of belonging she felt in worship, where “No voices touch the present, but numbers burned into arms of men in yarmulkes, women in shawls, sear unspoken,” with the exclusion of the public schoolroom where the teacher asked weekly “All the Jewish children and all the Negro children raise your hands...” The casualness of such everyday racism is insidious and internalizes easily, its power residing in the subtle threat that is never quite verbalized but naturally results from such persistent othering. The Holocaust was not even a full generation past at the time and cast an immense shadow. It still does.
“On the Margins” speaks from Joanne’s experience as a teacher sitting in a professional development session focused on children on the margins of society. The speaker tells them children “learn the most in those early, ego-centric years/ when they are still convinced/ they can do anything.” Thinking of children in her classroom, Joanne questions whether that is true of kids who are “hoping, like the thin blue line running up the notebook paper,” they “will be attended to but barely noticed?” Integrating detailed textural imagery with abstract concepts, Joanne does more than create beautiful verses. She witnesses a reality that is not often acknowledged: survivors of abuse will avoid being noticed in order to avoid pain. Success is a risk.
Read Joanne’s insightful poetry in Synkroniciti’s “Belonging” issue, available here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/. She will also be joining us for our “Identity” issue next year.
Joanne Durham is a retired educator, living on the North Carolina coast, with the ocean as her backyard and muse. She is the author of To Drink from a Wider Bowl, winner of the Sinclair Poetry Prize (Evening Street Press 2022) and the chapbook, On Shifting Shoals (Kelsay 2023). Recent awards include the 2023 Third Wednesday Magazine’s Annual Poetry Contest and the Mary Ruffin Poole Prize. Her poetry appears in Poetry South, Vox Populi, NC Literary Review, Whale Road Review, and many other journals and anthologies. She loves poetry because, in the words of poet Erik Campbell, “I have a soul that needs a periodic tune-up.”