Synkroniciti is pleased to welcome back Texan poet Ken Farrell with “Carnival of the Taken,” examining a father’s ongoing trauma many years after his son went missing at a carnival. The park is now defunct and abandoned, but the loss is as sharp as if it had happened yesterday. “He stood at the depot/ waiting for his son to disembark a/ train careening without any/ passengers. He waited for his son/ to emerge from the log ride/ running its effluvial channel/ endlessly, the logs all rot and/ absent screaming carnival-goers.” The father is haunted by what he saw the day of the kidnapping and by what he did not see and will never know. Some of the most fearful hauntings in our lives have nothing to do with the supernatural, but center squarely on the cruelty and evil that emanate from human beings. Ken fashions a tight, narrow prose poem which creates a sense of focus and compression that augments the essential horror of the father’s situation. He gives us a depiction of a waking nightmare, devoid of people but full of derelict buildings and urban decay. The imagery is heartbreakingly surreal.
Read “Carnival of the Taken” in Synkroniciti’s “Haunting” issue, available for purchase here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Ken Farrell’s poetry and fiction is forthcoming or published in various anthologies and in journals such as Pilgrimage, Book of Matches, Watershed Review, Coffin Bell, and Panoply. Ken holds an MFA from Texas State University and an MA from Salisbury University, and he has earned a living as an adjunct, cage fighter, pizzaiolo, and warehouseman. Responding to his daughter’s challenge, Ken is currently writing his first novel, a tale about a world where ghosts are jurors, the sky is off limits, and shards of souls are commodities.