Synkroniciti is excited to welcome back Houston poet, writer and visual artist Eloísa Pérez-Lozano with “The Battle Within,” a wonderful ekphrastic poem inspired by Sarcophagus Depicting a Battle between Soldiers and Amazon, a fixture in our Museum of Fine Arts here in Houston. The poem is divided into three sections, the first from the point of view of the Amazon warrior, “In her first battle, she leans close to her steed,/ her sweaty hand adjusting the grip on her axe./ Breath barely slips in and out of her heaving breast,” the second from the sculptor’s point of view, “Though normally he works by day, her eyes/ her gaze that penetrated him in sleep as deeply as her blade/ force him from his bed and down the stairs to the the/ block of marble that refused, earlier, to take shape at all,” and the final from the point of view of a middle school girl viewing the sarcophagus, “She looks down at her big sister’s shoes on her too-small feet/ then lifts her face to meet the gaze of the graceful lady,/ astride her horse with her axe held high.” Eloísa does such a splendid job of tracing the impact of this Amazon woman through time, showing that the spirit of female autonomy can never be vanquished, even if it has been suppressed for most of the intervening centuries. Her characters live and breathe and imagine a new feminist future, inviting us to do the same.
Read “The Battle Within” in Synkroniciti’s “Identity” issue, available for purchase here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/
Eloísa Pérez-Lozano (she/her) writes poems, essays and flash fiction about Mexican-American identity, women’s issues, and motherhood. She graduated from Iowa State University with a B.S. in psychology and an M.S. in journalism and mass communications. A Best of the Net-nominated writer, her work has been featured in The Texas Observer, Houston Chronicle, Houston Public Media, and MUTHA Magazine, among others. She enjoys singing, dancing and traveling, and she is a self-proclaimed Friends and Disney fiend. She lives with her family in Houston, Texas.