Anxiety, in this poem, is a craftsperson with scissors. "Anxiety is collaging my heart," the speaker says, and the present-continuous verb makes the damage feel ongoing, an artwork nobody asked for being assembled in the dark. The materials are all losses: "scraps torn from memory," "the flattened faces of my friends," and the oddly exact "quarter of my granddaughter's life." That last measurement is the sharpest. Time with a child becomes a quantity of paper cut away, and the fraction turns worry into arithmetic: what has been missed, what is left. The text suggests a speaker who is a grandparent and who feels cut off from the people they love, though the poem never says why.
The opening line sets a stranger scene: "I dream of unmasked riff-raff." "Riff-raff" is a dismissive, slightly old-fashioned word for a rabble, and "unmasked" strips that crowd of its disguise. Whether the masks are literal or figurative, the poem leaves open. What matters is the effect, a crowd whose faces are seen too clearly. A few lines later come the "flattened faces" of friends, now reduced to two dimensions, like cut-out photographs. Faces appear twice, once as menace and once as loss, and neither brings comfort.
Formally, the poem is free verse in two very different halves. The first is a single sprawling thought of seven short, uneven lines, which runs through a colon and ends in a question. It sounds like someone thinking aloud at night. Rhyme is absent, which suits a stanza about things that won't fit together, though sound still gathers in small clusters, as in the soft, repeated f of "flattened faces of my friends." The question "Will I ever have glue enough / to paste it together?" spills across a line break, and the enjambment itself holds the sentence together by a thread. "Glue" and "paste" are humble, almost schoolroom words. They shrink heartbreak down to a craft table, which makes the fear feel more human, and the question mark leaves it unanswered.
The answer, if it is one, comes in the second stanza, where the poem abruptly changes speed. Four lines, each a single word, each stopped by a full stop:
Emergency.
Emergence.
Emerge.
Resurge.
Here the poem does its real work. "Emergency" is the alarm, the siren word. Change two letters at the end and it becomes "Emergence," a word of birth and unfolding. The same panic and the same letters carry the opposite meaning. Then the word sheds its ending altogether and becomes "Emerge," which is not a noun but a command. The speaker has stopped describing a state and begun giving an instruction, perhaps to herself. Hidden in all three words is "merge," which quietly answers the earlier question about pasting things together. The final word, "Resurge," does not contain "merge," but it rhymes with it, and it supplies the prefix "re-" that means again. The poem's only true rhyme arrives in its last two words, after a whole stanza without any, so the ear feels something finally click into place.
That click explains the title. "Synchronicity" is a term associated with Jung for meaningful coincidence. Here the coincidence is made of language: words that happen to sound alike turn out to describe a path from crisis to recovery. The poem suggests that repair doesn't come from finding enough glue but from noticing a pattern already present in the words themselves.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does in so little space. It gives anxiety a vivid, tactile image, admits the fear in a real question, and refuses to answer it with a pat reassurance. Instead, hope arrives through sound and spelling, in four words that shrink and then leap. For a student, it shows how line length, punctuation and even a single prefix can carry as much feeling as any metaphor.