Synkroniciti is excited to welcome back Houston poet Sandi Stromberg, previously featured in our Dreams and Audacity issues, with two wonderfully atmospheric poems on the theme of Expectations.
“Say Goodbye to Forlorn” is a spirited invitation to embrace joy and liberation when life veers off its expected course. Stromberg writes with a playful resilience.
“True, you may have lost the script,/ mislaid it, don’t remember the plot/. But every day, you can reinvent yourself,// maybe clear a new space.”
Drawing on the image of bubbles rising in an overfilled jacuzzi, she encourages us to stop rushing about like Mickey Mouse in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and instead to float, to let delight lift us. The poem’s spunk lies in its gentle insistence that reinvention is not only possible but already underway. We simply have to tune into it.
In contrast, “Duplex: The Midnight Hour” turns toward the quiet mysteries of night. Here Sandi leans into the play of light and shadow, crafting an atmosphere of contemplative stillness. A table lamp’s reflection through blinds onto a neighbor’s wall becomes a portal into existential musing.
“Beyond this reality there are only ghosts./ Its beam guides me from window to bed.// A beam that morphs into dreamland,/ a lighthouse beacon spreading rays.”
The poem’s duplex form, two interlocking poems that can be read separately or as one, heightens its sense of layered perception. Whether approached as a pair or a unified whole, the work remains equally bewitching. Sandi transports us into a transcendent nocturne where dream and reality shimmer against each other. The threshold between them feels porous, alive.
Together, these poems offer a compelling meditation on expectation: how it shapes us, how it dissolves, and how beauty emerges in the spaces where certainty gives way to wonder.
Read Sandi’s gorgeous poetry in Synkroniciti’s Expectations, Vol. 8, No. 2, available here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/
Sandi Stromberg is the author of two poetry collections, Moonlight, Shaken (2026) and Frogs Don’t Sing Red (2023). Her poems have appeared in many small journals and anthologies, among them Synkroniciti, Red River Review, Equinox, San Pedro River Review, Gyroscope Review, MockingHeart Review, and The Senior Class. An editor at The Ekphrastic Review, she also edited two poetry anthologies—Untameable City: Poems on the Nature of Houston and Echoes of the Cordillera. A four-time Pushcart and two-time Best of the Net nominee, she was a juried poet in the Houston Poetry Fest eleven times. Dutch translations of her poems have appeared in the Netherlands in Brabant Cultureel.