Synkroniciti is glad to welcome back poet Jeanne Julian, residing in Maine, with two heartfelt, personal poems. The first, “Preservation,” is addressed to a sister, once stylish and self-reliant, who has found herself in the throes of alcoholism: “Somehow you lost touch/ with all that blooms. Sank. Stuck/ to razor-edged reef, you open/ to predators. Ambushed by angelfish,/ radiant and ravenous, your fragile façade/ pierced by beaks of subtle turtles…” Using ocean and diving metaphors inspired by a photograph taken in Tarpon Springs, Florida many years before, Jeanne plumbs the depths to recover what remains, unsure if she can bring her sister back up to the surface. Her alliterative music is insistent and rhythmic, her imagery deeply vulnerable, hope mixing with desperation.
“Kilroy in Hell For Brooks 1917-2009” tells the story of an all American boy–raised on the farm, a football hero–gone to war. “Kilroy” stood for American soldiers abroad during World War II and was often found in graffiti left by soldiers to memorialize that they had been in a particular place. Encountering the evils of Mittelbau-Dora, a Nazi concentration camp: the dead, the near-starved, the lack of regard for human life, Brooks was devastated and shattered, but put on a brave face for his wife at child at home. “When it was over, he stowed away his new knowing/ like he stuffed into his duffle bag/ the brassard from the stiff arm of some Hilfspolizei brute.” Such a thing can never be unseen and leaves a mental and spiritual wound that cannot be healed, and yet Brooks and men like him returned and moved on with their lives. Jeanne relates the experience with a clear-sighted vulnerability, neither diminishing nor exploiting the great suffering and brutality. The alliteration here is somber, like slow drum beats for the dead, and we feel ourselves slow down. There is a sense of reverence for those who endured and a desperation that cruelty not have the last word.
Read Jeanne’s heart-rending poetry in Synkroniciti’s “Recovery” issue, available for purchase here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Jeanne Julian is the author of Like the O in Hope (The Poetry Box, 2019) and two chapbooks. Her poems appear in Visions International, Hole in the Head Review, Kakalak, Ocotillo Review, RavensPerch and other journals and have won awards from Reed Magazine, The Comstock Review, and Naugatuck River Review. Having visited every U.S. state, she lives in Maine, where she practices yoga, hikes with her husband, and enjoys making scones. She formerly helped coordinate a live poetry open mic in New Bern, North Carolina, and now is active with Maine Poets Society and Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance.