Synkroniciti is honored to welcome back Sandra Salinas Newton, now residing in Paris, with two searing meditations on expectation and the uneasy passage of time.
“Minnesota” begins with a memory of a man Sandra once knew from Minnesota, an artist. They considered getting romantically involved but sensed they were too different. And yet there was something enigmatic there.
(he) “drew me once (surprising me that he captured/ the sadness at the corners of my mouth).”
From Paris, Sandra watches the news of killings in Minnesota by ICE—two young people unnamed here but unmistakably present in our collective consciousness. The poem does not linger on the brutality; instead, it traces how violence alters the texture of memory. The friend is remembered within the shadow cast by current events as a fellow escapee. We don’t know how he escaped or if he is alive, and that ambiguity is rich. Horror, deflection, survivor’s guilt—these currents move beneath the surface, reshaping the past without ever becoming the poem’s explicit subject.
“Mimosa,” one of our poetry contest finalists, opens in radiance: a young woman entering with a bouquet, bright with life and anticipation. The narrator, older and more knowing, recalls that mimosa is also called touch‑me‑not.
“But did you know,” I asked, “this?”/ reaching toward the garland and/ watching her surprise as the leaves/ bent away from my touch.”
The gesture becomes a quiet omen. The mimosa’s withdrawal mirrors the departure the narrator already anticipates—expected, inevitable, devastating. Newton leaves the relationship undefined: lover, parent, mentor, guardian. The ambiguity is deliberate, inviting the reader to inhabit the emotional space without the constraints of biography.
The poem’s power lies in its restraint. Loss is not dramatized; it is foreshadowed in a botanical reflex, a small movement that contains an entire future.
In both poems, Sandra allows the real story to happen outside of the poem, off-stage and out of frame. The subtle imagery does not blunt the ache of loss. If anything, her restraint deepens it.
Read Sandra’s exquisite poetry in Synkroniciti’s Expectations, Vol. 8, No. 2, available here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Sandra Salinas Newton was once a teacher, now (again) a learner: She is living her dream and working hard and joyfully: to write and live in Paris. How fortunate she is and grateful when her work is accepted by a publisher and resonates with an audience. She has published three novels and more than sixty poems both online and in print. She has completed two chapbooks of poetry (Almanac of Reckoning and Grievous Acts), and she’s currently working on two poetry collections and hoping to complete three episodes for a video/film series. She’s on the internet at http://www.s-newton.com and also on YouTube.