Synkroniciti is thrilled to welcome back poet Jeanne Julian of Maine, who appeared previously with us in our Haunting and Recovery issues. In Expectations she presents “For a Glimpse (Without Paying),” one of our poetry finalists. Jeanne traces the shape of a woman’s life from early childhood to old age, spurred on by curiosity and an appetite for risk and danger.
“Buoyed by an inflatable / orange cartoon dog. / Landlocked in Ohio all her days, / a lake’s chill and swell / beyond a cove safe as Jell-o / is all she knows of ocean.”
Each episode is a glimpse beyond safety, a daring step toward the unknown, full of rich imagery. With wit and wonder, Jeanne reminds us that expectation is most powerful when it is active: a reaching, a risk, a willingness to blur the line between peril and possibility. Using carnival imagery and the shifting landscapes of memory, she paints a vivid portrait of a woman whose life is defined not by caution, but by the courage to peer under the canvas, to swim past the breakwater, and to embrace the thrill of danger as inseparable from discovery.
Read “For a Glimpse (Without Paying)” in Synkroniciti’s Expectations, Vol. 8, No. 2, available here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Jeanne Julian is the author of Like the O in Hope (The Poetry Box, 2019) and two chapbooks. Her poems appear in Visions International, Hole in the Head Review, Kakalak, Ocotillo Review, RavensPerch and other journals and have won awards from Reed Magazine, The Comstock Review, and Naugatuck River Review. Having visited every U.S. state, she lives in Maine, where she practices yoga, plays tennis, and rides the mailboat for fun. She serves on the board of the Maine Poets Society and is co-editor of its new anthology, Timberline and Shoreline. Find her compendium of quotations for writers at http://www.jeannejulian.com.