Synkroniciti is thrilled to welcome poet Faith-Anne Bell of Baltimore with “Prelude,” a delicious poem about desire and expectation. In the quiet of her kitchen, standing beside her beloved, the speaker lets her shirt slip just enough to reveal the tattoo on her shoulder blade. His fascination sparks an electric moment of touch, stuttering forward into intimacy.
“It is a secret longing of my tattoo to/ to be touched, & traced, & admired”
Faith-Anne encodes breathlessness into the poem’s rhythm and form, repeating the word “to” and using ampersands to gently collapse and expand the spacing of the poem. The result feels immediate, improvised and devoid of the cliché which so often plagues romantic poetry. What emerges instead is a playful, quietly daring acknowledgment of pleasure: the speaker delights in being seen and momentarily objectified, while the tattoo itself becomes a sentient participant in the encounter.
Faith-Anne shows us how intimacy can bloom in the span of a breath.
Read “Prelude” in Synkroniciti’s Expectations issue, Vol. 8, No. 2, available here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Faith-Anne Bell lives in Baltimore, Maryland. She has a BA in English Literature & minor in American Studies from UMBC. Her work has recently been featured in such journals as Stanza: Growth, Gaslamp Pulp, Blue Heron Review, & Superpresent. She has a micro chapbook entitled Grieving Him (Bottlecap Press). Faith-Anne is a fan of books, black & white movies, old sitcoms, anime, the Oxford comma, musicals, coffee, & all things nerdy. You can find her at Baltimore area open mics.