Synkroniciti is excited to welcome Chicago poet and writer Greg Sendi with “Amour,” an intense narrative poem that follows the speaker and the daughter of an elderly neighbor into the old woman’s home after she mysteriously disappeared. The front door refuses to open, something heavy and unyielding pressed against it from within, so they are forced to break in through the back door. What follows is a slow, breath‑held crossing into a space where memory, accumulation, and mortality converge.
“To breach a door with brunt or guile,/ consult the Onomasticon/ of Bozorgdad the Gīleh Mard,/ who tells in quatrains grim and old/ the applications of a maul/ or shimwedge, prybar, torch or sledge,/ though, as it happens, not a brute-/ forged, one-pound clawhammer/ or red, oak-handled screwdriver,/ the kind I used that night to reach Amour/ and help unearth what had become of her.”
Across nine stanzas, Greg sustains a taut, pulsing suspense. The iambs strike like footsteps through the dark as the pair moves from the back of the house toward the obstructed front door, wading through a sea of possessions that testify to a life of curiosity, travel, and private ritual. Masks, keepsakes, papers, photographs, musical instruments—objects once cherished—become uncanny in the narrow beam of a flashlight. Each item feels both intimate and estranged, as though the house itself were holding its breath.
Even though the poem signals its destination from the very first stanza, the foreknowledge does not soften the blow. Instead, it sharpens the reader’s awareness of each detail, each hesitant advance, each object encountered in the dimness. The inevitability of mortality gathers force as the poem progresses, until the final revelation arrives with the weight of something long expected yet still devastating.
Read “Amour” in Synkroniciti’s Expectations, Vol. 8, No. 2, available here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/
Greg Sendi lives in and writes from Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood where, according to a recent Chicago magazine article, “only the weird survive.” “Amour” was first performed live at the Jarvis Square Tavern, also in Rogers Park, on April 22, 2025, two months following the events described in the poem. His poetry, fiction and essays have appeared in a wide range of literary, specialty and general interest publications. His poem “The Dardanelles” recently won the Lazuli Literary 2024 Writing Contest. His poems “A Compass for Ariadne” and “Bottom” were finalists for the Tennessee Williams & New Orleans Literary Festival Poetry Contest. His short story “Two Not Touch” was shortlisted for the Driftwood Press Adrift competition.