Synkroniciti is delighted to welcome poet Margo Davis of Houston with two poems treading the edge where whimsy meets insight. “Shaking Free” explores human habit and how difficult and time-consuming it is to learn to let go of other’s expectations and be ourselves. The imagery is playful but remarkably apt and we relate so strongly that we feel briefly exposed, “a stunned child/ thrust onstage who stumbles through lines/ jingly as a fistful of hangers plunking/ onto uncarpeted floor.”
“Rush Hour Queue at Custom Carwash” is another study of human habits. A couple is getting their car washed and seem to be perfectly in sync with one another. Formally, this poem alternates indented and non-indented stanzas, the first Margo’s observations of the couple, the latter her observations of the team washing their car. This creates a braided structure with two poems that weave together into a whole. This plays up both Margo’s desire to distract herself from the lovebirds and the in-sync similarity of the couple’s interaction with that of the cleaners. The result is whimsical, with, as Evelyn Waugh once said in Brideshead Revisited, a “thin batsqueak of sexuality.”
“I watch the clockwise sweep of busy hands/ expertly dry their double-tinted Porsche.// Like magnets, when one twitches or drifts,/ the other shifts.”
Read Margo’s wonderfully mischievous poetry in Synkroniciti’s “Patterns” issue, Vol. 7, No. 4, available for purchase here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Margo Davis defends writing as a socially acceptable form of talking to herself. Perhaps subject to what’s said. A three-time Pushcart nominee, her poems have appeared in The Ekphrastic Review, Passager, Verse Daily, Equinox, Panoply, Willawaw and numerous anthologies (Dos Gatos Press & LULP). Her chapbook Quicksilver is available on Amazon. Uncoupling (Lamar Press) is to appear either side of December, seven come eleven. Poised for a spring writing fellowship in the Pacific Northwest, Margo hovers in Houston, packed bag beneath the bed.