Synkroniciti is overjoyed to welcome back Californian poet Jeffrey Bryant with “Outside,” a surrealist poem about finding recovery in Mother Earth, even as she is tormented by climate change and human pollution. “I walked outside and it was like the end of things all over again, the/ atmosphere raped by a layer of oil profit so thickly brown I barely/ missed a bullet.” This damage does not separate him, recovering from a deadly illness, from the earth, but binds him more tightly to her, longing for the healing rays of the sun. “Do not fear me, said my solar lord and savior. And do not fear that/ upon which your feet are planted. Come into me. I laid the carpet of/ a brand-new day before you. Bleed no more.” Healing is to be found in strengthening our bond with nature and embracing life, not in finding ourselves “lying in bed,/ an extraterrestrial cable show to keep me sane until the feared/ arrival of a stranger with his briefcase full of last rites…” Jeffrey’s imagery is vivid and theatrical, yet deeply personal and intimate. “Outside” is a love letter to life and sensory experience in a time when virtual reality has taken on an artificial dominance. We cannot create anything more wonderful than this marvelous world we have been given and if we do not maintain this gift, virtual reality will not sustain us for long, not in any form that resembles health.
Read “Outside” in Synkroniciti’s “Vulnerable” issue, available for pre-order here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Jeffrey Bryant is a Pushcart-nominated queer poet/writer who lives in Los Angeles. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Weekly, the Los Angeles Times, Poetic Diversity, the New Verse News, Poetrysuperhighway.com, Synkroniciti Magazine and Quill and Echo. His work has also appeared in the anthologies The Coiled Serpent from Tia Chucha Press; the 2020 Altadena Literary Review from Shabda Press; Shadowplay Literary Journal from the University of Arkansas and Sparring with Beatnik Ghosts from Mystic Boxing Commission Press.