Synkroniciti is thrilled to welcome back poet Maureen Tolman Flannery, who splits her time between Chicago and Wyoming. Her three new poems, circling the theme of Expectations, demonstrate her gift for illuminating the fragile hinge between what we hope for and what we become.
“Shot with Expectation” is a meditation on the life and death of a family friend, a sheepherder, one of those intriguing people who, despite charisma and obvious skills, never lives up to their full potential. Maureen presents him with tenderness rather than judgment, allowing his contradictions to remain intact: the soldier who became a wanderer, the charmer who dissolved into dependency, the man whose magic persists even as his life thins out.
“In recent years, my father took him fishing,/ petted his flock of needy cats,/ dried him out on bottom days,/ remembered for him the handsome soldier/ who’d come out west and took to herding sheep.”
Maureen reminds us that it is not always the best people that have successful lives.
“If” is about that powerful, short word on which hinges so much expectation.
“If, that unlikely Atlas/ of a bold, hunched-over little word,/ hoists on its emaciated shoulders/ the unwieldy weight of all possible worlds.”
The poem dances lightly, but its insight is sharp: expectation is built on a single syllable, fragile yet immense. It’s a meditation on how language itself becomes a vessel for hope, doubt, and the branching paths of human choice.
Winner of our Expectations Poetry Contest, “Aztec Herbology” begins like an ethnographic guide to ancient medicinal practice—charms, curses, herbal lore—and gradually unfurls into a profound inquiry into human destiny. The Aztecs recognized four causes of illness: the brujo’s curse, the patient’s own negative energy, divine displeasure, and the loss of destiny. It is this final cause that Flannery seizes with particular force.
“You wake up a stranger in your own life,/ realize you have been plodding through the dictates of someone else’s drive./ You have worked to internalize expectations that have no relation to your soul./ And the worst is you don’t even know who you meant yourself to be./ And the body falls ill of its undoing,/ develops a chill in the very cellular failure to be what it is.”
Maureen’s verse is elegant but never pretentious, intelligent and visceral at the same time. Her imagery is finely wrought and her willingness to speak what others avoid is profound–those truths that flicker at the edges of ordinary life, the expectations we inherit, resist, or fail to meet. She writes with compassion for human frailty and with a clear eye for the forces, internal and external, that shape a life.
Read Maureen’s powerful poetry in Synkroniciti’s Expectations issue, Vol. 8, No. 2, available here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Maureen Tolman Flannery is a Chicago poet raised in a Wyoming sheep ranching family. She and Dan, her actor husband of fifty-seven years, have recently returned to Wyoming to rescue and restore three historic log cabins. More than five hundred of her poems have been published in anthologies and literary reviews, among them: North American Review, Xavier Review, Winning Writers, BorderSenses, Wisconsin Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Santa Fe Literary Review, Calyx, Pedestal, and Atlanta Review. Her latest book of poetry is Already Part of the Sky. Other volumes include Tunnel Into Morning, Destiny Whispers to the Beloved, and Snow and Roses about the White Rose resistance in Nazi Germany. She is currently adapting the Snow and Roses poems into a full-length theatre production.