Synkroniciti is thrilled to welcome the winner of our “Identity” poetry contest, Akua Lezli Hope from New York with two vivid poems exploring femininity and blackness. “Black Orpheus V,” our winner, is a haibun, a prose poem accompanied by a haiku designed to distill and intensify the feeling of the piece. Akua explores the 1959 film Black Orpheus, based on the play Orfeu da Conceição by Vinicius de Moraes, which adapted the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, setting it in a favela in Rio de Janeiro during Carnaval. If you don’t know the movie, Akua’s imagery paints the picture for you, focusing on Eurydice, a small town girl fled to the city in a vain and innocent attempt to escape death. “Knowing this she packed, fled to the great alien metropolis where she found in Orpheus delicious fulfillment, the perfect ripeness of exquisite mango whose fragrant, filling flesh satiates and awakens desire to explore more, all the realms of song and being…” His charisma and magic are not enough to save her–he lacks the discipline which she possesses. Akua’s imagery is rich and captivating, her alliteration and structural repetition mesmerizing. The final haiku is a dramatic gesture, interior rhyme and punchy rhythm packed into its taut 5-7-5 structure.
“The Pigeon Ladies” describes memories of women Akua met on the subway as a child, a type she and her brother dubbed “pigeon ladies” because of their “mounds of chest flesh feathered in floral dresses.” These ladies always offered sweets, which her parents refused, and they always had a story to share. She wonders on the connection they felt to her. “Perhaps it was just that, she,/ an escapee from European wars and woes,/ without her birth language, had, in this huge foreign city,/ felt something deep and real for a little black girl/ a kinship through the rumble and sigh of the train…” This intersectionality points us toward a better world, in which we don’t fight over scraps, but bring each other sweetness. Akua’s imagery is so rich and her rhythm so gripping that one is plunged into the subway journey, an allegory for life itself.
Read Akua’s masterful poetry in Synkroniciti’s “Identity” issue, available for purchase here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/
Akua Lezli Hope, a Grand Master of Fantastic Poetry (SFPA) and paraplegic creator of poems, patterns, stories, music, sculpture, & adornments, has been in print since 1974. Her collections include Embouchure: Poems on Jazz and Other Musics (Writer’s Digest Book Award) & Otherwheres: Speculative Poetry (Elgin Award). A Cave Canem fellow, her honors include NEA & NYFA fellowships; SFPA, Rhysling & IGNYTE awards; NYSCA grants for Afrofuturist, speculative, pastoral poetry & disability poetics.
She created the ongoing Speculative Sundays Poetry Reading series & edited NOMBONO: An Anthology of Speculative Poetry by BIPOC Creators, the first of its kind. Her speculative fiction is included in the celebrated anthologies Dark Matter & Africa Risen. She exhibits her artwork regularly & practices her soprano saxophone.
Thank you for including me in this wonderful issue! Grateful and delighted!
We are so lucky to have your incredible poetry! Thanks for being a part of “Identity.”