Synkroniciti is delighted to welcome Houstonian poet and writer Melissa McEver Huckabay with “Sleeping Late, I Heard,” a moving poem of transparent simplicity, belying its depth. In the liminal state between sleeping and waking, the narrator hears the voice of a dead friend urging her to shift her priorities. “She didn’t tell me how long I’d fight/ or where the warring would lead,/ just that I was needed.” Many people experience auditory or visual sensations in the moments before waking. Are these messages from beyond or voices from our subconscious, perhaps messages from beyond coming through our subconscious? Melissa invites us to ponder this and to recognize the power of synchronicity to give meaning in our lives and signal time for a change, though we may not know how to begin that change. Her experience is akin to the memento mori (remember you will die) moment, but occupies a non-corporeal space where death may not have the same meaning as it does for flesh. Melissa leaves us with a question “But what forces/ would pull me away from this place,// these full hands, this wound/ I washed and bandaged myself?/ This love I chose to lead me home?” This question closes the “Haunting” issue with the possibility of something transcending death, a bigger perspective that we can only speak of in terms of archetypes and symbols that haunt the edges of our lives.
Read “Sleeping Late, I Heard” in Synkroniciti’s “Haunting” issue, Vol. 6, No. 4, available here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Melissa McEver Huckabay has an MFA in poetry from Texas State University and teaches writing at University of Houston-Downtown. Her poetry has appeared in SWWIM, Poetry South, Phoebe Journal, Thimble Literary Magazine, Sweet: A Literary Confection, and elsewhere, and is forthcoming in Minnesota Review. Her short fiction has won the Spider’s Web Flash Fiction Prize from Spider Road Press. She was a 2023 Contributor to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She still has really intense dreams.