Welcome, readers, to December’s issue of Synchronized Chaos Magazine. This month we’re ‘leveling up,’ moving ahead in our understanding and navigating different levels as we would after mastering a stage in a video game.
These submissions involve different shades of meaning: symbols, dreams, subconscious thoughts, and the combination of different areas of knowledge.
Tony LeTigre review Richard Brautigan’s novel Trout Fishing in America, the rambling thoughts of a wandering mind, with beauty beyond the literal text.
Joan Beebe dreams of an abundant and warm Christmas morning, a scene of welcome and comfort that harkens back to centuries ago. Another piece of hers illustrates the depression caused by unfulfilled longings, pointing out through contrast what the holidays often represent for us beneath the surface.
In Luna Acorcha’s poem, the speaker subconsciously reflects on their mother and other people close to them. Their almost mystified gratitude and appreciation for people around them comes through, even if their words are unclear.
Mahbub’s poetic speakers find themselves pulled out of everyday life by intense feelings of romantic or family love, and these powerful experiences cause them to contemplate and ask deeper questions about their role in the continuity of human existence. Yusuf BM’s piece also shows an ordinary person who works, prays, and lives as expected given his situation, yet once he’s alone at night, he’s thinking about his place in the world.
In Christopher Bernard’s fifth installment of his novel Amor I Kaos, deep existential questions lurk beneath each everyday encounter as a couple goes about their lives. J.J. Campbell’s speakers outgrow their conceptions of their past traditional beliefs and go make their own ways in the world, to varying degrees of success.
Aremu Adams Adebisi’s speakers cannot escape the realities of war and violence, even in times of personal contemplation or when in love. The same proves true in Abigail George’s literary, thoughtful pieces, where we see high intellectual beauty but also the memory of oppression.
In contrast to their subtlety, Jake Cosmos Aller directly confronts the chaos and violence of our world with long poems meant to overwhelm and disgust us with what we have allowed the world to become.
In her regular monthly Book Periscope column, Elizabeth Hughes reviews Stephen Patterson’s novel Rosetta, a science fiction piece touching on linguistics, biology, ecology, hard science, and the possibility of civilizations in space. Kitty Yeung, engineer and physicist and fashion designer who integrates custom electronics into clothing and believes this brings about heightened potential for creative expression, highlights the beauty of different disciplines by combining them.
Allison Grayhurst and Diane Barbarash also mix different forms of art, as Barbarash sets Grayhurst’s Pushcart Prize-nominated poetry to music. The songs they sent us to sample tell of protected pet animals and lovers – pieces of intimacy and connection.
We wish you connection and peace as you enjoy this issue and the varied submissions, and the many levels on which they can be understood.
