The Raven




He’s spending 

Some time

At the Raven,

This could be

DC’s finest dive,

Three Budweisers in

And he’s wondering

If he should

Start coming here

More regularly.



Taylor Dibbert is a writer, journalist, and poet in Washington, DC. “Rescue Dog,” his fifth book, is due out this month.

Wild Child

I was six months old when my father was sent to Vietnam. We left Oklahoma, where my father had been stationed in the army, and moved back to Nebraska, where my parents had grown up. My aunt stayed with us while my uncle was serving in the National Guard. My brother found his photo, crumpled it up, and threw it in the garbage can. “This is my daddy’s house,” he said. “This is not your house, Aunt Judy.” I used to wake up early and screech from my crib. My mother kept sleeping while my aunt got up and comforted me. Soon I was pulling myself up over the wall of my crib, dropping to the floor, and crawling around the house. I was my mother’s wild child.


Father, Stranger

I learned how to whistle, then talk, while my father was in Vietnam—wading through rice paddies and trekking through jungle, carrying a heavy pack and cooking his C rations with rice and bullion, surviving after his chopper crashed in a hot zone and losing his best friend in an early morning ambush. I didn’t recognize him when he came home. My brother sat in the front seat of the car chatting away. I sat in the backseat silent. Eventually I crawled over the backrest and sat between my brother and father. I kept my head down the whole time.


Digging to China

When my father left the army, we moved to Nebraska where he earned his Master of Business Administration. My brother and I dug a hole in the backyard. I said I was digging to China, inspired by my grandfather who flew cargo over the Himalayas—the hump—from India to China during World War II. My mother snapped a photo of us with mud all over—from face to toe—and my father kept it on his desk when he became a businessman.


You Don’t Own the Street

We played baseball on a dead end street across from our house and we used a rock in Mr. Dellapoli’s yard as first base. Once, he came out and yelled at us. I was a little kid but I wasn’t afraid. I put my hands on my hips and shot back, “M. Dellapoli, you don’t own the street!”



Karol Nielsen is the author of the memoirs Walking A&P and Black Elephants and three poetry chapbooks. Her first memoir was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. Her full-length poetry collection was a finalist for the Colorado Prize for Poetry. Her poem “This New Manhattan” was a finalist for the Ruth Stone Poetry Prize.

A Well Organized and Thoughtful Work Has Been Written by Jacques Fleury

Publisher, Author House

2023

By Jacques Fleury

Jacques Fleury’s book is a fine read, and will be inspiring and informative for many readers. The book is about the author’s journey of self discovery and acceptance, spanning an entire life still being lived. Students of many disciplines will gain from reading it including but not limited to sociology, philosophy, psychology, religion and spirituality, and social justice. 

The structure of the book is well done with headings that are interesting and informative quotes from other authors. Fleury is a careful and considerate writer who has put much thought into his project. The reader is in soucient, capable hands. 

I see the author through this work not only as a survivor, but a thriver. From Haitian Christian school that was difficult, and then emigrating to North American soil, the author addresses issues, but does not become cynical or jaded in his journeys. Obviously well read plus practiced at writing, he expresses his thoughts on everything from diet and physical health, to education and spirituality. He is on a journey of self discovery as a human and as a writer. 

Among particularly interesting aspects of the book are the parts on modern mental health pharmacology. Without demonizing the industry, the writer has the talent to articulate the idea that people encountering that industry via its adjacent industry of therapy might want to proceed with caution, and self advocacy are the words of the day. This is a timely and important message in the current climate of so many pills to solve so many problems. 

Another topic covered well is the idea of masculinity and what it is versus what it is thought to be. It seems the author is able to identify what historically is the case for masculine behaviour and when not wholly accepting it still accept himself. This is courageous and an educational, thought provoking and an empowering aspect of the book. 

‘We must follow the energy that awakens the fire of the heart, and greet life with gusto and optimism, not sorrow and pessimism’ page 150. This is a great quote in the Fleury book that encapsulates the message of the book. In these troubled times of economic strife for many, homelessness, environmental decay, wars, continued racism and classism and other harmful isms, the book does not lose faith in people but strengthens the idea and hopefully reality that each person can through some awareness and self advocacy, create a better life. 

You Are Enough: The Journey to Accepting Your Authentic Self, is a thoughtful, well crafted and well rounded work of introspection and positively that we should all take the time to read. 

⁃ Brian Michael Barbeito 

You Are Enough: The Journey To Accepting Your Authentic Self is available here.

Jacques Fleury is a Boston Globe featured Haitian-American Poet, Educator, Author of four books and literary arts student at Harvard University online. His latest publication “You Are Enough: The Journey to Accepting Your Authentic Self” & other titles are available at all Boston Public Libraries, the University of Massachusetts Healey Library, University of Wyoming, Askews and Holts Library Services in the United Kingdom, The Harvard Book Store, The Grolier Poetry Bookshop, amazon etc… He has been published in prestigious publications such as Muddy River Poetry Review, the Cornell University Press anthology Class Lives: Stories from Our Economic Divide, Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene among others…Visit him at http://www.authorsden.com/jacquesfleury.

Techno-Feudalism like Yanis Varoufakis Said

under whom we cheerlead the destruction of our kind – 
our heads bowed down with the weight of the media 
-Marc di Saverio (2020). Crito Di Volta, 31.

Former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin is building an investor group to acquire ByteDance’s TikTok, as a bipartisan piece of legislation winding its way through Congress threatens its continued existence in the U.S.
-Rohan Goswami and Jesse Pound (2024). 

You are under surveillance!
And the USA is seizing the surveillance for MAGA.

The scramble for cyberspace: 1884 all over again.
Invade. Colonize. Partition.
There are only terra nullius and eminent domain
in platform empires.

Trump’s Treasury Secretary will have your kid’s data.
Trump’s Treasury Secretary will know your recipes and décor hacks.
Twerking tweens will twerk for Trump now.

Now we can all be Miss Teen USA.
Help! We don’t even live in the USA!
Steve Mnuchin wants a platform, and to wear a crown.

MAGA will buy TikTok with offshore accounts,
Then offshoring whales will onboard TikTok in Uncle Sam’s name.
Android-Apple-Alphabet – California Caliphate,
Christian Nationalist internet.
while microserfs make BitCoin bets.
What did you monetize today?
What do the 5 Eyes not see already?
Can one Eye subpoena what another Eye surveils?

What is the difference between “Treasury Secretary” and “Chairman?”
Mao we get to find out.


Terry Trowbridge has appeared in Synchronized Chaos before. He is grateful to the Ontario Arts Council for funding poetry during the polycrisis.

While reading Neurodivergent Pride #5 I became interested in interviewing Rikki Branson because of her essay “Faith and Authority:  A Generation X Spiritual Journey”.  We are acquainted from both being involved in publishing in the San Francisco Bay Area in the mid 2010s, and I had been raised Roman Catholic but have both had a complicated relationship to organized religion since the 1990s.

AI: You were already in Jr. High when your parents took you to an evangelical Protestant church.  Did you have any exposure to organized religion before that?  Do you mind sharing more specifically what kind of church it was?

RB:  Sure, it was a Christian and Missionary Alliance church, which at the time was pretty much a mainstream Protestant megachurch in the suburbs. I think my experience is similar to many people’s experiences, though, regardless of what denomination of church they attended.

And I had heard of Christian religion before, I was actually the one who got my parents to take my brother and I to church when I was little! I had read in books about people going to church and thought it was a way to meet other kids and be part of some grand and meaningful cause, so I kept asking them to take us to church, which they finally did.

AI: You mentioned Traveling Mercies by Anne Lamott for her description of her spiritual journey as like being lily pads, meandering like a frog. Do you still feel that way? Is there more you’d like to say about Lamott’s writing?

RB:  Yes, and what I meant by that was that my spiritual journey wasn’t a straight line from one point to another. In some seasons I thought more about faith and spirituality than in other seasons, and I’ve found myself re-learning similar lessons and re-thinking the same issues. And I’d end up re-examining the same thing sometimes but from a different angle based on a person or event that had entered my life.

Even the times in my life when I was cynical towards religion were still part of my journey, because I was still engaging with the concept of faith, even to dismiss it. And while I haven’t read anything by Anne Lamott in awhile so can’t speak to her current writing, I do still identify with the “lily pads” metaphor.

AI: You mentioned that your parents told you as a teenager that you seemed autistic, but you didn’t actually get diagnosed until you were an adult. How important do you think a potential adult diagnosis is for others?

RB:  I do think an adult diagnosis can help people of any age who want to better understand themselves. When I was diagnosed, a lot of the focus (understandably) was on helping me with job searching and money management as those were issues I was facing at that time, but we did briefly bring up other topics such as relationships and friendships and faith and spirituality. There are things therapists said to me that I’d like to go back and explore and would bring up in a session if I were still in therapy at UCSF, and I do think the therapy experience gave me things to consider that were useful and interesting.

I think some people don’t pursue diagnoses because they feel that putting a “label” on themselves will limit them or they want to make it in life without making excuses or getting special treatment. But I think that now with autism and other conditions, we have a deeper understanding that autism can affect people in very different ways and that there are many ways to be autistic (just as there are many ways to practice faith/spirituality!) A diagnosis isn’t a statement of your destiny or an excuse, it’s more of a guide to how your unique brain works, where you have strengths and where you might need more support.

I think a diagnosis can help if you are able to access support systems (job coaching, accommodations at work, etc) because of the diagnosis. Or, if you choose to just use the information for yourself and Google “help for autistic people to organize their closet” or something like that, if regular advice for non-autistic people isn’t working for you. There is less stigma attached to mental health and neurological diagnoses now due to more knowledge about them and more people getting diagnosed, and if you choose to get diagnosed and tell people, you can help to lessen that stigma even further.

That said, I would never want to be someone who reduces stigma by claiming “not to be like those other autistic people” who don’t blend in as easily to neurotypical society or have more support needs. We are all valid and all deserve respect.

AI: I like/identify with your “uneasy mental truce with” your faith after college. I consider myself to be culturally catholic (small c no mistake), do you feel like your faith or lack there of is similar? Jesuscentric is a concept I read about on livejournal if I’m not mistaken that I liked back in the ’00s. Unitarian Universalism can also be pretty cool.

RB:  I’ve not heard the term “Jesuscentric” but I do hear “Christ follower” to express that someone is inspired by and hopes to emulate Jesus, but without all of the cultural and political connotations that can come with the word “Christian.” I think it’s a way to say things a bit differently, to get a chance to explain what you mean before you activate people’s cultural stereotypes and have them put you in a box before you get to define yourself.

Yes, I would say that I’m probably similar to what you’re getting at with culturally catholic, although I do think there’s more to being a Christ follower than the cultural Christianity that involves, say, putting up a Christmas tree around the holidays or taking Sunday off. It’s about choosing to live in a more mindful and intentional way that’s inspired by how Jesus acted in the Gospels: love your neighbor, forgive your enemy, treat everyone and the natural world with respect. Getting back to the basics without all the modern cultural and political associations that can come to people’s minds when they think of Christian religion.

AI:  For clarification, for me, being small c and/or culturally catholic isn’t about the church as an institution, high holidays or mass on Sunday.  To me, that is what mainstream religion is.  For me it’s more like the Catholic Worker Movement or Ecclesiastical Base Communities.  Feeding the hungry, offering clothing and shelter to those in need.  Opposing imperialism and the death penalty.  Penpalling with, and sending books to prisoners. 

It’s like the story of the father who asked his son to do some work, and the son said he wouldn’t, but he did it anyways.  His other son said he’d do the work but didn’t.  Faith without works is dead as they say, I’m far more interested in the work than the faith. I was raised Roman Catholic but became an atheist in my youth, then an Evangelical and Pentecostal Christian as a young adult, but left that milieu largely over the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but also the total indifference to things like sweat shops, the environment, and practically everything wrong with the world except a very narrow definition of what’s “wrong.” 

RB:  I can relate to that!

AI: Do you feel like the publishing executive you mentioned is a good example of non-religious mentorship?

RB:  Yes, I would say so. I think that mentorship and just adult friendship in general is something that people are really lacking in Western/American society. So much of what I heard about adult friendship when I was growing up as a teen was focused on how adults should grow up, settle down, stop hanging out with buddies and spend their non-working hours with their families. I’m all for people being good spouses and good parents, parenting is a very important form of mentoring. But I think we just spend so many hours working, job searching, networking, commuting etc that we don’t have enough hours left to invest in our communities and relationships so we’re forced to ration out the little time we do have and direct it to smaller and smaller circles of people. That’s the problem we should really address, why we’re kept so busy that we can’t maintain normal relationships the way we did when we had a village to support us and we interacted with that village. And friendships don’t have to take you away from your family. I have friends who have children and I’m always down for spending time with them with kids included!

You don’t need to be religious to be a mentor or be mentored, but I think that one good thing that religion provides is a structure where people can meet each other and become friends or mentors/mentees, where platonic friendship is encouraged and supported. I think we need more of this in the world.

AI: do you consider yourself to be on a third path outside of the worldliness vs spirituality world view?

RB:  Yes, I’m still somewhere on that third path. I don’t know how to describe the stage of spiritual life that I’m in now, but I do feel that I’m still on the journey somewhere. I still consider myself a Christ-follower.

What I’m focusing energy on now is working to rebuild communities and social structures that went away during the height of the pandemic. Covid hasn’t totally gone away and I’m all for accommodating people with disabilities or people who are immunocompromised, and am looking forward to rebuilding our social connections in more mindful and inclusive ways. Where I live in Northern California there’s a lot of media talk about how our cities are in a “doom loop” because of violence and economic problems, and I’m writing and speaking about remembering and honoring the role cities have played in America in terms of safety and community for some POC, LGBT and immigrant people and about supporting the communities that exist in our cities. Not sure how that all fits into my Christ-follower faith journey, but I suppose it’s about community and respect which I think is a big part of the good that faith and spirituality can bring to society.

AI: I agree with your critique of submission being linked to “traditional” gender roles, but would add it’s also part of the inherent violence in the white supremacist aspect of the hyper segregated, white dominated churches in the US. The flip of this to me is Liberation Theology, minority churches and actively anti-racist/peace churches can be liberatory. How do you feel about this five years further along in life?

RB:  I related submission to gender roles in my essay because that was what I’d heard growing up, and that’s what I thought I was qualified to speak about, as a white woman.

But all of our unjust social power dynamics, including racism and white supremacy, manifest in our mainstream churches, and I do think it’s important to be actively anti-racist and actively oppose and work against in society and call yourself out for racism and other issues. A few racist things I now recognize from when I was younger from my mostly white church were that we put on a play and listened to music about the sacrifices of some white missionaries who were murdered by native people but didn’t look at the whole story in context. The natives were presented much like the Orcs in Lord of the Rings and it was only as an adult that I read a book that mentioned that the indigenous tribe in question was not “unreached by civilization” but engaged in legal and sometimes physical combat with oil company representatives who wanted to take their land and that the murders happened because one Indigenous man lied to their chief to cover up a love affair, not because they had a cultural habit of murdering all trespassers. But the story was told in an extremely white-centric way.

I also remember missionaries saying that people in other countries who practiced other faiths were under demonic influence and that their religious music was obnoxious, and someone who adopted a boy from East Asia changing the boy’s name to Noel and saying that he was now God’s gift to him and his wife. White supremacy, which I believe was unintentional there, just stemming from a culture saturated in that, would manifest as looking at problems in other countries as horrific but problems here in the U.S. as just sort of unfortunate, and as a hyperfocus on relating every Bible story to something to do with our individual lives or families without considering social justice or social implications. The story of Rahab hiding the Jericho spies, for example, was about how you should follow God before it’s too late, and the illustration was of a man who couldn’t accept his wife’s forgiveness for his affair and didn’t try to get her back until she was already remarried. Not about genocide or war or the role of women or marginalized racial groups, but about American suburban marital drama.

But when I was in my “cynical phase” in my twenties, I didn’t have the tools or language yet as a white person to critique racism and classism in the church. That’s something that came later as I matured. I’m embarrassed and ashamed that I didn’t immediately notice the toxic aspects that weren’t directly aimed at me, and I am committed to learning more and doing better. And I think consciously anti-racist and anti-oppression churches can help with that.

Don't Miss Me #DMM 
<--- Title Of Poem #TOP 

Don't miss me when I'm gone,
For I'll be in a better place.
But please, don't forget me,
And the love we used to embrace.

Don't miss me when I'm gone,
For I'll be free from all pain.
But please, don't let my memory fade,
And our moments be in vain.

Don't miss me when I'm gone,
For I'll be in eternal sleep.
But please, don't forget my face,
And the promises we couldn't keep.

Don't miss me when I'm gone,
For I'll be just a memory.
But please, don't let me be forgotten,
And our love become a mystery.

Don't miss me when I'm gone,
For I'll be at peace at last.
But please, don't forget my name,
And the moments that have passed.

Don't miss me when I'm gone,
For I'll be beyond your reach.
But please, don't let go of our love,
And the lessons that it did teach.

Don't miss me when I'm gone,
For I'll be in a better place.
But please, don't forget me,
And the love we used to embrace.

✍🏿🗣🎤 Ike Boat

It was Hot Like Summer and the Demons Ran Deep, or Not in This Life Anyways


the rains had arrived when there was supposed to be snow, and the fields became beige and flaxen again, and the world was strange and stayed that way. it was as if it had longed to be strange and present that part of its personality that nobody cared about. and now that it had gotten the chance, it wasn’t going to give it up. for many days and nights the precipitation continued. an old solitary hawk that lived somewhere near or perhaps on the top of the movie-house came down and alighted atop a No Trespassing sign. a dirty sad area, who would want to trespass there anyhow? I watched the beautiful hawk as it looked for something, here and there a bit like you look for where you put your keys down right?- found it, jumped down, seeming to let itself fall down more so than jump, having just jumped into the air I felt, retrieved the thing, and left. later I had seen a few souls, two in person and two in vision, that presented well enough, but which I felt were possessed. I have a soft spot for the aged, the idea of the old man w/his sweater and perhaps book or cane even, hard fought sagacity as it were…but not these ones. whatever had taken up residence in them, if I was right, (you always have to leave room for the idea of being wrong), had really done a number on their souls. I was sad and always a bit startled at this. let them be for it was not my responsibility and besides,- these people wouldn’t only not change, but would defend their ideas to the end. pride. arrogance. one day that end would come, but that was up to the Whole, the Universe, God, whatever nomenclature or moniker one chose or that was in fashion. the rain was rain for the high temperature. if you went near a window or outside it actually felt warm and sometimes hot. back by the way of the hawk again, I glanced to see if my old friend who was not my real friend was around. nothing though. no hawk today. sometimes there is nothing but the rain. 



Brian Michael Barbeito is a Canadian writer and photographer. Prose poem and landscape photo book, Still Some Crazy Summer Wind Coming Through, is forthcoming from Dark Winter Literary Press, summer 2024.