Synkroniciti is thrilled to welcome poet (and visual artist) Kate Peper, based in northern California, with three gripping poems, full of powerful personal imagery and narrative. The prose poem “Self Portrait as a Bell,” one of our finalists in the “Identity” contests, recounts the debut of a shining new bell on a town square of a small American town. It’s a tortured, disappointing moment as the bell’s voice fails to live up to the sound expected by the crowd. “The mayor and a swarm of officials stampeded up the belfry. One by one they stood under its iron skirt. Fissures were found not seen from the outside. The clapper was mute, yet one woman was sure it shuddered at her touch. Others put their ear to the cool metal and swore they heard a river.” It is a heart-wrenching piece, the subtle imagery of the bell’s skirt, its ribs, hinting that the bell is an allegory for a woman. Society deems her voice unsuitable due to some structural imperfection they fail to understand. Kate draws us in with a characterization that feels simple at first, then deepens into something that is both more dark and more human.
“Visiting a Freak Show at the State Fair That Summer I Found Out I Was Born Without a Vagina or Uterus” brings the experience of being different out of the shadows. This poem is about the trauma experienced at a session at the Mayo clinic, where a doctor and his interns explore the body of the narrator, a young woman with this congenital difference: “Direct all questions to me, not the patient,/ he reminded one young man.” She compares this horrendous experience to that of a man on display in a circus tent because of his extraordinarily large feet and shows us how dehumanizing the human gaze can be. Shame is internalized out of self-defense. How do we change this abusive element of humanity?
The final poem, “Vision Quest,” describes a dawn encounter with wild horses in the desert east of Mono Lake in California on the third day of a pilgrimage. “I stare, arms out./ Here is my death roaring to life./ Wave after wave, shaking/ the night off everything.” It is a surreal moment, and it passes, leaving everything changed and yet the same.
Read Kate’s insightful poems in Synkroniciti’s “Identity” issue, available for purchase here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Kate Peper’s chapbook, Dipped In Black Water, won the New Women’s Voices Award from Finishing Line Press. Her poems have been nominated five times for a Pushcart and have appeared in Gargoyle, MacGuffin, ONE ART, Pedestal, Rattle, Tar River Review and others. Also a watercolor painter, her work has been featured in The Adroit Journal, phoebe and Nostos.
This is absolutely brilliant.
Thank you! Kate’s poetry is outstanding and there’s more great stuff in our “Identity” issue.