Synkroniciti is delighted to welcome back poet, writer, and visual artist Rachael Ikins, who has appeared with us many times since her first publication in our third issue, Empathy, in early 2020. For Expectations, she brings us two powerful pieces—a prose poem and a creative nonfiction memoir—that inhabit very different corners of our modern world and illuminate the theme with her characteristic blend of wit, vulnerability, and fierce insight.
“Big Feet” recounts the story of a painting Rachael made years ago and the reaction it provoked in a man, a poet who fancied himself a gatekeeper.
“When we arrived at the reading our host was drunk. My friend whispered that it likely wasn’t water in the water bottle. The host argued with my artwork, the chicken’s feet were too big in his opinion as were women who didn’t wait to be asked. Like me.”
Many of us—particularly, though not exclusively, women—have encountered these gatekeepers, people who host others not to celebrate their work but to diminish it, building their own critical persona by cutting others down. Rachael exposes this behavior with sharp, merciless wit, revealing the emptiness at its core, how dead and ignorant it is. Her final paragraph turns toward the chick with big feet, reclaiming her with triumphant humor and earthy delight.
“A chicken crosses a road on proportionate feet. Surrounded by worms escaping last night’s deluge. So many night crawlers. She eats them all.”
“Keeping You a Secret” explores the decision to come out to her mother. After a pleasant dinner one evening, she resolved to tell her about Gen, remembering her mother’s reaction to a woman she dated in college. Rachael was 52. A few days later she collected the mail.
“Halfway up the yard, in the light from the back door, I saw an envelope addressed to Genevieve with my mom’s distinctive back-slanted, leftie script.
My heart leapt into my mouth. I couldn’t help it. Dread.”
What follows is a reminder that people can surprise us.
Read Rachael’s moving prose in Synkroniciti’s Expectations, Vol. 8, No. 2, available here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Rachael Ikins is the author of the award-winning poetry collection Just Two Girls, For Kate, Broken Spoons, A Handbook for Alchemists, and The Woman with Three Elbows, the young reader book A Piglet for David, also an award winner, and The Magic Blankie sequel as well as fantasy, Totems, and thriller, Haven, many illustrated with her art.
When she sits down to work, cats/dogs launch immediate crises—starvation, dash out/in etc. They live on a small lake. She planted a garden around a stand of 50-year-old sugar maples for the dragons who roost in them.
Find her at http://www.claresongbirdspub.com, Raw Earth Ink, Cyberwit, FinishingLine Press and Foothills and in many fine journals such as Red Wheelbarrow, Panoply, Synkroniciti Magazine, Braindump and more.