Please join Synkroniciti in welcoming Iowan poet Suzanna C. de Baca. We are excited to publish two insightful and poignant pieces about vulnerability in the face of personal and communal disaster. “Fourteen Ways to Prevent Birds from Flying into Your Windows,” is one of our poetry finalists. The title might recall Wallace Stevens and his classic “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” but Suzanna is not talking about different ways of seeing so much as the failure to see–the failure of human empathy and responsibility. Just as we build structures that kill birds or run over small animals with our cars, we also fail to see the human cost of how our society is structured and fail to make change on a fundamental level to save lives. “Flying too close to something/, lured by hunger, friendliness,/ the need for approval, rage./ But no one sees me crashing/ into glass. No one hears the/ struggle to get up over and over/ again.” The rhythmic, alliterative music and enjambment build a crescendo of pathos that reads intensely, yet restrained, a voice lost in the wind. The second poem, “What do you do when you cannot breathe?” recounts the fall of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. How does one recover from such an experience when the trauma of the experience has not ended–physically or mentally. “How I dreamed of that plume for decades, how it/ permeated everything: the smell, the odor of burning plastic, eating away at my throat like/ acid. All the while the question: how to go on, how to start.” Formally, the poem is a compromised structure, with internal holes that are analogous to the holes left in the lives of survivors, their families and friends. Suzanna’s poems grapple with disaster in a way that is elegant, intelligent and understated, yet full of emotion.
Read Suzanna’s heartbreaking poetry in Synkroniciti’s “Vulnerable” issue, available here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Suzanna C. de Baca is a native Iowan, proud Latina, businessperson, author and artist. She is an member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative. Her poetry has been published in numerous literary journals, including: Etched Onyx; Wholeness; Written Tales; Impermanent Earth; Voices de la Luna; Choeofpleirn Press; Our Silent Voices Anthology; Black Fox Literary Magazine; iō Literary Review;Yellow Arrow Press; The Letter Review; Way Words Literary Journal; Telling Magazine; Plate of Pandemic; Persimmon; LitEZINE; Blue Heron Review; Call me [Brackets]at University of Alabama, Consortium and other outlets. She is the recipient of the Derick Burleson Poetry Award and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She lives in the small rural town of Huxley, Iowa, population 4244.