Synkroniciti is excited to welcome poet and writer Tina Harrach Denetclaw with two moving poems about recovery and resilience. “I ordered a storm door made in Minnesota” is about making a safe home in the face of cancer and modern American society. After hanging her new door, the workman, an immigrant, chatted with her husband, who was in the early, fragile stages of recovery from cancer, and remarked on the welcoming spirit of her home. The same determination that saw them through cancer and treatment is now deployed against an unfriendly political landscape.
“There is a different storm now, in the air and on the airwaves,/ pelting us all.// I set my jaw and leveled my gaze/ as my father would do in the face of danger// You will not take the peace of our home.”
“Mile Marker in the Dark” celebrates the promise of a future without cancer. “We were grateful for the chance to live, but did not know how long/ we would hold our breath waiting for the unknown.” Pancreatic cancer rarely recurs after two years of remission, and this mile marker is more than welcome.
Read Tina’s inspiring poetry in Synkroniciti’s “Recovery” issue, available for purchase here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Tina Harrach Denetclaw is a clinical pharmacist by trade, specialized in critical care and emergency medicine. Her poetry and creative nonfiction have appeared in Eclectica Magazine, Silver Birch Press | Poetry and Prose…from Prompts Series, The RavensPerch, Leading the Way: The Wisdom of the Navajo People, and Pulse: Voices from the Heart of Medicine. She was a semi-finalist for the Brett Elizabeth Jenkins Poetry Prize, and in the Finishing Line Press 2025 Open Chapbook Competition. Her debut chapbook, Life Travels, will be released in March 2026 from Finishing Line Press and will contain both poems featured in this issue.
She and her husband live in the San Francisco Bay Area where her husband is a biology professor, first reader of her poems, and favorite muse for her writing. They have five cats.
Such meaningful words so beautifully expressed!
Thank you, Lynn!