Synkroniciti is delighted to welcome back poet and writer Sandra Salinas Newton, currently based in Austin, Texas, with “Venice,” a poem about one of Europe’s most polarizing cities. “A city that does not float but balances on the dead wooden piles/ Which the mother Adriatic has caressed to splinters laying silent/ In the depths where the sardines flutter in murky schools/ Cloaked in the black ink of a passing squid.” The unease of this ancient city, full of ghosts, myths, and shadows of stories, has a profound effect on our narrator. The imagery is beautiful but vaguely menacing, the rhythm of the verses, peppered with sibilants and fricatives, like the lapping of the waves against wood and stone. Whatever your feelings about Venice, you cannot deny the uniqueness of her streets. Humanity has a different relationship to the sea and to the land there, as well as a different feeling about mortality.
Read “Venice” in Synkroniciti’s “Haunting” issue, Vol. 6, No. 4, available here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Sandra Salinas Newton is a novelist, poet, and enthusiastic herder of four cats (although they believe her to be their devoted servant) in Austin, Texas where, when it’s hot, it’s beastly hot, and when it’s cold—who am I kidding? It’s never cold in Austin, Texas. Chilly, yes; cold, no. She thinks Austin is great but still yearns for New York City.