Please join Synkroniciti in welcoming Houstonian poet Elina Petrova. We are thrilled to feature two poems. Sköll, named after the sun-eating wolf of Norse mythology, describes an ephemeral experience as the narrator walks out of everyday reality during a business call and finds herself “in the dark sculpture garden with mythic creatures who/ come alive when I touch their statues. I stop at the wolf,// in the hologram of whose eyes I fall like an astronaut/ spaghettied by the gravity gradient of a black hole…” Elina’s striking imagery finds us on the edge of the subconscious where our modern lives meet ancient archetypes and beings that remain as relevant to us as the air we breathe. “Dawn Priestess” is a trilogy exploring haunted hotels: the Place d’Armes in New Orleans, Louisiana; the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado (Elina echoes the shape of this hotel in the structure of the second part of her poem); and the Marshall House in Savannah, Georgia. From a ghostly woman who slips into bed with unsuspecting guests to a phantom piano playing ragtime at frenetic speed to a soldier looking for his missing arm, these are spine-chilling stories, and we are grateful to Elina for bringing them into the relative safety of our personal spaces. The integration of intuition with intellect in Elina’s work is quite bewitching and very Jungian, pointing us toward deepening synchronicities.
Read Elina’s enchanting poetry in Synkroniciti’s “Haunting” issue, Vol. 6, No. 4, available here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Until 2007, Elina Petrova lived in Ukraine and worked in engineering management. Currently she assists in a Houston law firm. After her debut book in Russian, Elina published two poetry books in English: Aching Miracle, 2015, and Desert Candles, 2019.
Elina’s poems have appeared in Notre Dame Review, Texas Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Southwestern American Literature, Porter House Review, California Quarterly; anthologies by presses of Sul Ross State University, Lamar University and elsewhere. A film presenting her poem at the 2023 Miami Chroma Film Festival won in the category Best Cinematic Poetry.