Synkroniciti is pleased to welcome back Pennsylvanian poet Philip Andrew Lisi, who first joined us for “Vulnerable,” with three poems about relationships and the desire for relationship. In each of these poems, Philip presents an endearing combination of beauty and awkwardness that is so familiar to anyone who has ever loved. In “First Kiss,” a boy practices kissing in front of a mirror, remembering his disastrous experience at recess, only to be surprised and schooled by his older brother. “Not like that, you hear Francis advise/ from the door to the bedroom you share./ In the mirror, cheeks flush with heat/ knowing someone saw.” The prose poem “Diner Love” recounts a first date nearly scuttled by a ketchup bottle but saved by a forgiving spirit…and dessert. “But as I stare at the tomatoey Rorschach splotch adorning the front of your date-night dress, I guess I must have misjudged the synchronicity between white metal top with its spiral grooves and the striated glass of the neck.” Finally, “Marigold in Your Absence” is a lament for a lost relationship, using a pet chicken, Marigold, as a way to address the absence that is so raw in the narrator’s mind. “You told me once how you loved holding her,/ your fingers nesting in her soft downy undercoat,/ her hollow bones offering a sense of weightlessness/ and the potential for flight.” The tenderness of Philip’s descriptive imagery and the vulnerability of his emotion dances in delicate musical phrases that pull at our heartstrings.
Read Philip’s delightful poetry in Synkroniciti’s “Belonging” issue, available here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Philip Andrew Lisi is a teacher, poet, and sometime actor. He holds degrees from Davidson College and North Carolina State University and recently completed an MFA program in poetry at Arcadia University.
While living in Raleigh, NC, he taught composition and literature courses for many years before returning to his hometown of Lancaster, PA, where he currently resides with his family and their cantankerous Wichien Maat cat, Hazel, who has a knack for commandeering his laptop and yowling her way into his work. His poetry has appeared in Wild Roof, Carolina Muse, Sky Island, Third Wednesday, Last Leaves, October Hill, and elsewhere.