Synkroniciti is excited to welcome back Texan poet and writer Ken Farrell with two poems that explore the need for recovery. “Hopscotch” tells a story of innocence lost in the struggle to survive the fallout of war. “A man of thirteen walks/ rubble-strewn streets/ his Kalashnikov loose at the end/ of his pendulum arm.” The setting is certainly war-torn Ukraine, but similar things happen anywhere military force engages civilian lives. Youth becomes wily; it learns to survive without trust on the scant scraps of hope left in the wreckage. “Gypsum and the Gypsy,” one of our poetry contest finalists, reflects on an argument while on a road trip near White Sands, New Mexico during the Winter Solstice that leaves our narrator wandering the gypsum sands in the moonlight. “Sometimes, solitude is pure. Sometimes/ I crave it. I want to feel clean/ to match the luminous white—/ not of the moon—of the sand.” His vulnerability, his discomfort with his selfishness is heart-wrenching and extremely moving. “Back down the road/ my husband waits—now: To return?/ And how to make repair?” Ken inspires me deeply with his willingness to look into the darker places of the human psyche and make alliterative and sibilant music from the disquiet he finds there. Every word is placed carefully with intention marked by unflinching honesty.
Read “Hopscotch” and “Gysum and the Gypsy” in Synkroniciti’s “Recovery” issue, available for purchase here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Originally from Colorado, Ken Farrell lives and writes in Texas, his work appearing in various anthologies and in journals such as NonBinary Review/4LPH4NUM3R1C, Horseshoe Literary Magazine, Pilgrimage, Sport Literate, and Watershed Review. Ken holds an MFA from Texas State University and an MA from Salisbury University, and he has earned as an adjunct, cage fighter, pizzaiolo, and warehouseman. Responding to his daughter’s challenge, Ken is writing his first novel, a tale about an orphan navigating a world where ghosts are jurors, the sky is off limits, and shards of souls are commodities.