Synkroniciti is excited to welcome back writer and poet Rachael Ikins from New York with “How Do You Know,” a memoir piece in palm-of -hand style (single page, distilled memory) that recounts falling in love and being intimate with the man who would become her husband for more than three decades. “Phillip had been my surgeon nine months earlier. During the removal of my right lung’s lowest lobe, the back of his hand had rested against my heart as he worked. Did we begin with that quiet unseen pulsation? For sure the scar that remains beneath my armpit is his signature.” There is so much risk in falling in love, even without the baggage that society places upon us to “get it right,” and yet it is one of the joys of life when two people come together with openness and authentic desire. To have that happen is worth risk, whether it lasts three years or thirty-five. Rachael handles the beauty and the awkwardness with a vulnerability and humor that makes us smile.
Read “How Do You Know” in our “Family” issue, available here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Rachael Ikins followed her pen into the forest as a child. As happened to Gretel in the Grimm Brothers’ tale, a wicked witch forced her to reroute through valleys so dark she doubted the existence of the sun at times. A fabulous wizard held her heart in his hand. They fell in love. He urged her to release poetry from her soul.
She lost everything before she understood her truth: write like a motherfucker, write or die. For poetry was the constant through all storms, the beloved she refused to relinquish.
She won some prizes, published in journals and then books. When last seen Ikins was feeding pickled jalapeños to a large dragon perched on the roof of her house—a dragon who bestowed her name upon Ikins’s cat. Sister souls of fire and passion.
Contact Rachel to order her new book,Handbook For Alchemists(2024 Cyberwit.net).