Synkroniciti is excited to welcome poet Wren Hankins from Ohio with “One Day Closer.” This is an achingly vulnerable expression of the trauma caused by being molested at the age of thirteen: “he says if i was any/ smaller/ I’d just disappear// he doesn’t sound sad.” The narrator is haunted by this horrific violation of trust and personhood and feels as if in the eighteen years since she has been doing just that–getting smaller and smaller: “the scale says it’s working/ measure the empty spaces/ between myself/ and everyone// one day closer/ to being a ghost.” The injustice is that this child, now a woman, did nothing to merit this unwanted physical attention, and yet she bears the shame of it. Survival is an uneasy victory.
Wren doesn’t overwhelm with detail, and what she does not reveal speaks as loudly as what she does. It is so hard to tell such stories in a way that defangs the memory, but Wren does so beautifully. The clarity of imagery creates a distilled vision, telling the story in a few strokes, using repetition to create structure. Part of the strength of her poem is the visual element, which creates space not only on the page, but in our minds. Some lines consist of only one word as Wren slows us down to absorb the grief and frustration in the text and then uses enjambment to pull us forward again.
Read “One Day Closer” in Synkroniciti’s “Haunting” issue, Vol. 6, No. 4, available here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/. You do not want to miss this talented and important emerging voice.
Wren Hankins is an Appalachian creative who struggles with, among many other things, chronic daydreaming. She dabbles in a wide variety of artistic expression, from poetry to painting to tattooing. She hopes her work will someday help destigmatize mental illness, and she fully believes that art has power to heal even the deepest wounds, turning shame into resilience and isolation into community.
She lives in Athens County, Ohio with her family. This includes an almost laughable number of animals, all of whom are friends, not food.