Please join Synkroniciti in welcoming poet and writer Hollie Hardy, based in Austin, Texas, with “How We Recover,” a luminous poem comprised of fleeting images and sensory experiences along a medical recovery journey. “Half shaved in purple light. The kiss goodbye. The backwards count. Reverse stepping/ down a mountain into a pool of darkness. The cold emptiness of space. The gurney./ How you orbit ungravity. A satellite asleep.” Hollie guides us through surgery and beyond, accompanied by symbols of loss and hope manifested in the everyday and the abstract. Like a journey to a far distant planet, this sequence of moments is transformational. Recovery is not a return to an original state of normalcy but an establishment of a new one, one which ideally honors our past and leaves room for new ways of thriving. As we journey through the process, we have no guarantees and no sense of the big picture, just a drifting sense of now. Hollie distills that for us masterfully by giving us a landscape of words with few verbs, rich instead with imagery that overtakes us and pulls us along like those vulnerable early phases of recovery before we get our bearings. And yet, “How recklessly we gather hope.”
Read “How We Recover” in Synkroniciti’s “Recovery” issue, available for purchase here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Hollie Hardy is a writer, educator, and author of Lions Like Us (Red Light Lit Press, 2024) and How to Take a Bullet: And Other Survival Poems (Punk Hostage Press, 2014), winner of the Annual Poetry Center Book Award at San Francisco State University. She holds an MFA in Poetry from SFSU and teaches private writing workshops online. She is the founder of Praxis Poetry: Weekly Prompts for Poets, and host of Saturday Night Special: A Virtual Open Mic. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and published in numerous anthologies and literary journals. She lives in Austin, TX.