Synkroniciti is excited to welcome California based poet Cynthia Bernard with two poems, “Daddy” and “A Dream About My Mother.” Both were finalists in our “Family” poetry contest and both deconstruct and transcend childhood trauma. The prose poem “Daddy” calls out childhood abuse which, over time, internalized, creating damage decades later. “When my therapist said you were a terrible father, you flared up within me and almost cascaded out of my mouth…” Cynthia’s imagery is so vulnerable and apt–“I remember you looking at me as if you opened up a long-lost Tupperware from the back of the fridge and saw something disgusting…” By confronting these uncomfortable images, she flexes her power over abuse, both in memory and in the present moment. “A Dream About My Mother” is a dialogue between the waking, conscious mind and a nightmare in which her mother is driving a car through a street packed with children while reading the newspaper and laughing. As the mind searches for some archetypal meaning, it also wishes to transcend that meaning and not be subject to a mother whose central transgression was refusing to acknowledge abuse or damage. Why can’t the mind dismiss her as she dismissed her own responsibility? These poems are powerful pieces about resolving and healing issues created by family and the exploitation of closeness and vulnerability.
Read Cynthia’s insightful poetry in our “Family” issue, available here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Cynthia Bernard is a woman in her early seventies who is finding her voice as a poet and writer of flash fiction and essays after many years of silence. A long-time classroom teacher and a spiritual mentor, she lives and writes on a hill overlooking the ocean, about 25 miles south of San Francisco. Her writing has appeared in many journals and anthologies in the US and internationally, and she was selected by Western Rivers Conservancy to serve as the Poet-Protector of Deer Creek Falls in the northern Sierra Nevada foothills.