Synkroniciti is delighted to welcome back poet and writer Sara McAulay, based in the San Francisco Bay Area, with “One That Got Away,” one of our “Recovery” poetry finalists. Sara relates a vivid childhood memory of decorating the wall by her bookcase with ocean and jungle scenes. “There was muscle in the brush, life-blood/ in the ink: snake and camel, mouse and whale—/ I drew them and they breathed.” Unfortunately, her mother’s gaze broke the spell and she was ordered to get a sponge and clean up the mess. Ashamed, she moved the bookcase to cover what she could not remove and enacted an unsettling scene of execution upon her stuffed animals. So often the adult world crushes creativity and we spend decades or a lifetime unlearning repression dispensed in the name of neatness. And yet, in her response, Sara kindles the fire of defiance, a potent creative force. This is a dramatic poem: the soaring wonder of the creative act, the flat denial of her mother’s reaction, the sting of suppressed creative rage are expressed with passion and unflinching honesty in alliterative and assonant rhythm. The standard stanza here is three lines, with a single line stanza at the center of the poem as her mother demands she destroy what she has made. The final scene of mock violence breaks into a visual poem, the flamboyant spacing and indentation picturing the chaos and and anger boiling over in the moment.
Read “One That Got Away” in Synkroniciti’s “Recovery” issue, available for purchase here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Sara McAulay is the author of three novels and numerous works of short fiction. She received NEA and New Jersey Council on the Arts Fellowships in prose. In recent years, she has turned to poetry and flash, with work published in The Atlanta Review, Brooklyn Review, Halfway Down the Stairs, The MacGuffin, Quartet, Rise Up Review, RockPaperPoem, Sand Hills, Sky Island Review, and others, and has been nominated for Best of the Net. Her poetry chapbook, ask river, was a finalist in the Finishing Line Press 2025 open competition, and will be published in 2026. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she gets into as much good trouble as she can.