Synkroniciti is pleased to welcome back poet Maureen Tolman Flannery, featured in our previous issue, “Space,” as a member of Chicago’s P2 Collective. Solo this time, Maureen takes us back to 1943 and the first meeting of her parents in “Two Step.” We see the literal and metaphorical dance of their relationship, the moment when her mother loses her heart to this handsome soldier-cowboy, the moment when she “trades/ the ruby of her wholeness for a pirate’s chest// of longing buried in wet sand of her aspirations.” Maureen’s imagery creates a visceral response. She focuses on her mother’s experience, acknowledging the sacrifices she made to raise her family away from the shadow World War II left on all aspects of society. Moving away from the city to the sheep-ranch, she left behind her dreams to nurture the future of her children. Many of our mothers and grandmothers did the same.
Read “Two Step” in our “Family” issue, available at https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Maureen Tolman Flannery is a Chicago poet raised in a Wyoming sheep ranching family. She and her husband of fifty-four years have recently returned to Wyoming to rescue and restore three historic log cabins.
More than five hundred of her poems have been published in anthologies and literary reviews, among them: North American Review, Xavier Review, Winning Writers, BorderSenses, Wisconsin Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Santa Fe Literary Review, Calyx, Pedestal, and Atlanta Review.
Her latest book of poetry is Already Part of the Sky. Other volumes include Tunnel Into Morning, Destiny Whispers to the Beloved, and the chapbook Snow and Roses about the White Rose resistance in Nazi Germany. She is currently adapting the Snow and Roses poems into a full-length theatre production.