Welcome to June’s issue of Synchronized Chaos Magazine.

This issue illustrates that to a point we can choose how to interpret the world around us. As with a children’s connect-the-dots picture, the facts of life may to some extent be established, but we have some say over the connections and conclusions we draw from them.

Poet Vijay Nair draws once more upon classical Greek mythology, with a homage to the story of Pygmalion and Galatea, where a man creates and falls in love with a statue of an idealized female figure. In the same way, we all create and embrace our own ideals, as we come up with our own concepts of what is beautiful and important to focus on in life.

Some of this month’s writers are sincere in their appreciation for the world. Joan Beebe’s poetry celebrates birds in flight, stars in the nighttime sky, and the world after sunset, with a wish for humans to act with care towards each other in light of so much natural beauty. Mimi Mathis honors veterans from World War II in a piece inspired by oral history interviews she conducted.

Their genuine words contrast with the cynicism inherent in Michael Marrotti’s short story lampooning an over-the-top writers’ workshop and J.J. Campbell’s more serious poetry that provides small snapshots of people with broken lives.

Mahbub’s poetry selections this month remind us of life’s impermanence. We aren’t going to be here forever, and neither are our loved ones, so we may as well choose to make the most of the time that we do have.

Elizabeth Hughes, in her monthly Book Periscope review column, shows us the writing of a woman who has done that. Darrah Perez, an author and performance artist from the Wind River Native reservation in Wyoming, has given us three collections of poetry and prose that describe her journey through life as she overcame addiction and other obstacles to be able to impart wisdom to others.

Elizabeth Hughes also reviews Joe Klingler’s new suspense novel Tune Up, about the young female San Francisco police detective Kandy and her older Inuit partner Qiqig’s work on a homicide that intersects with the story of Mylin, a talented violinist. Crime solving inevitably involves ‘connecting the dots.’

J.D. DeHart offers up thoughts in the form of little vignettes reminiscent of paintings, slices of life from unusual angles. We see calm strength through a gorilla keeper’s eyes, opened minds as a family comes to full understanding of their mother’s life and stature, self-critique as a person realizes that archetypes of people in distress speak more to his own need to rescue than to those others, pity for those whose human foibles are recorded electronically for posterity – and children, once grown, who take control and begin creating their own stories, shaping their own mythologies independent of the fairy tales of previous generations.

We hope that this issue helps empower you to develop and act upon a worldview that energizes and inspires you.