Synkroniciti is honored to welcome back Bulgarian poet Gabriela Manolova, who won our Patterns poetry contest last year, with “Fish Bones.” The poem is a meditation on anxiety as a trauma response and the courage required to continue living. In this striking piece, Gabriela transforms emotional abstraction into vivid sensory imagery, grounding her exploration of fear in the intimate act of eating.
“For those days when life feels like eating fish:/ each bite cautious, tongue searching/ for the small hidden bone—/ so alert to the possibility of pain.”
With exquisite precision, she captures the way the expectation of harm robs us of pleasure and sustenance. Yet “Fish Bones” refuses despair. Gabriela affirms that it is better to risk a wound from a bone piercing the gum than to starve. To live is to accept danger, to embrace the possibility of hurt as the price of tasting what nurtures us.
This poem reminds us that resilience is not the absence of fear, but the willingness to move through it, even when we expect the worst. Gabriela’s voice is both tender and unflinching, inviting us to reclaim the fullness of life even when anxiety whispers caution. “Fish Bones” is a testament to the necessity of risk and the power of vulnerability.
Read “Fish Bones” in Synkroniciti’s Expectations, Vol. 8, No. 2, available here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
A lifelong dreamer and lover of language, Gabriela Manolova (Sofia, Bulgaria) began writing in childhood as a way to process thoughts and emotions. With a background in linguistics, she works as an administrative translator between Norwegian, English, and Bulgarian, and offers developmental editing for emerging novelists while exploring her own fiction. When not immersed in words, she can be found swing dancing or hiking.