Synkroniciti is pleased to welcome back poet Samuel Prestridge from Georgia with two poems. “Poem In Which My Father Turns into Boxes of Bulk Pork Sausage (After a Wrong Turn While Driving a Truck for my Father, Hattiesburg, MS, 1977)” is a delightfully snarky memory from his time in the family business. “Coming out an alley, an old woman/ is cursing her pig. Must be: unswearing,/ no one fidgets hands that way…” The irony of the moment is not lost, this vulnerable pig crossing in front of a truckload of pork product, and neither is the critique of capitalist productivity culture and its lack of observance and humor. “I don’t know if he’d see the joke here, but/ I know what he’d think of burning his dime/ to watch her beat him homeward…” Samuel is full of impish humor and his imagery catches the surreal in everyday life. “Villanelle: My Youngest Son, When Coming to Terms with Gravity, Would Not Be Instructed” uses the repetitive structure of the villanelle to illustrate how small children are constantly falling as they learn to walk, jump and move. Samuel avers that this pattern of falling is the model for adulthood. “I hope for you, bold son, eternally vast/ indifference to a possible concrete kiss—/ that success will hold you fearless, and you’ll laugh…” Life contains a series of hard knocks, and it is how we recover from them that determines happiness.
Read Samuel’s cheeky poetry in Synkroniciti’s “Vulnerable” issue, available here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Samuel Prestridge lives and works in Athens, Georgia. He has published work in numerous publications, including Literary Imagination, Style, The Arkansas Review, As It Ought To Be, Poetry Quarterly, Appalachian Quarterly, Paideuma, The Lullwater Review, Poem, and The Southern Humanities Review.
“I write poetry,” he says, “because there are matters that cannot be directly stated, but that are essential to the survival of whatever soul we can still have. Also, I’m no good at interpretive dance, which is the only other option that’s occurred to me.”
He is a post-aspirational man and his book A Pebble’s Worth of Riot, a Dog’s Job of Work is seeking publication. His children generally affirm that he is an adequate father.