Synkroniciti is glad to welcome back poet and photographer Katharine Weinmann from the Canadian prairie. “Hung Out to Dry” is a poem about family. No one knows the tender spots in our souls like our families do, and this vulnerability is particularly raw with a parent who, ill at ease in their own being, uses the knowledge to lash out and wound. After a trip to bury her mother-in-law turned into a series of micro and macro aggressions with her mother, Katharine found herself divulging her experience to a sympathetic friend. “I just returned home from lunch with a friend/ and now I’m sitting with a belly full/ of ham-and-cheese sandwiches and shame.” And yet this shame is a precursor to letting go of the pain and wounding and beginning to heal. “Telling my friend my truth/, I had aired some dirty laundry and thought, driving home,/ how ironic that in Italy, a country I love, and where I feel wonderfully alive,/ they hang theirs from balconies and across narrow streets./ Rainbows of colour fluttering intimate, waving without pretension.” Katharine has illustrated “Hung Out to Dry” with one of her marvelous travel photos from Italy, colorful house linens hanging with intimate apparel in that most public of places, the piazza. It’s an evocative metaphor, one that shows us a better way to live.
Experience “Hung Out to Dry” in Synkroniciti’s “Vulnerable” issue, available here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Katharine Weinmann is a seeker whose reading of poets and philosophers shapes the container from which her words and images emerge, revealing beauty in her imperfect, sometimes broken, mostly well-lived and much-loved life. An intrepid traveler, she enjoys sharing good food and fine wine with family and friends anytime, any place. As an internationally published poet and photographer, she blogs at A Wabi Sabi Life. Katharine lives with her husband on the Canadian prairies, but her heart also finds its home in Italy. Che bello!