Synkroniciti is glad to welcome back Australian poet Miles Hitchcock with two poems about lines that shape human experience. “Borders” is about the imaginary lines we draw to classify and motivate people. Wars are fought and economies built upon these impermanent and changeable constructs. “But propaganda blurs rubble/ new flags blank out old memories/ the semiotic climate changes/ and codes of allegiance switch.” “Fault Lines” is about the constant possibility for healing or decay that occurs where people come together. “Given enough heat, all things unify./ Given enough velocity,/ all things disappear into themselves.” These boundaries are unpredictable and people sometimes bind together behind causes they would never embrace by themselves. Miles has a scientific approach to behavior and empathy that is illuminating–we don’t often think about the basic needs and assumptions which lead us in directions we don’t fully understand. His writing is honest and clear, his forms elegant and understated.
Read Miles’s perceptive poems in our September 1st issue, “Broken,” available for purchase here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Miles Hitchcock works as a teacher, journalist, community support worker, and musician on Noongar land in Perth, West Australia. His fiction has won the Curtin Fiction Award and the Melbourne Age Short Story Award, and his poetry has recently appeared in Westerly Magazine and Science Write Now.