Joanna Sakellion's Intersecting Lives

Death: it is something that has touched, or will touch, every single human being in the world. It is something that connects all living things to one another and helps humans relate experiences, and one person’s death may affect many. Through the usage visual elements such as color and symbolism along with her words, Joanna Sakellion’s “Intersecting Lives” shows how a woman’s death connected three individuals.

The poem’s colors and the symbol of the key at the onset of the poem help to foreshadow the poem’s contents and the theme of death that connects three individuals. From the beginning to the end of “Intersecting Lives,” only the colors black and white were used (Sakellion). Black is a color that symbolizes death, which is the main

After one clicks on the keyhole at the start of the poem, appear three faces, which are the mother, son, and the son’s significant other, who symbolize past, present, and future (Sakellion). The mother is the past, and will soon be gone, the son is the present, and the son’s significant other symbolizes the future of the family because one day she may have children and carry on the family. Also, the ties that are shown between the mother and the son and the son and the woman also symbolize the ties between the past, present, and future: how they are not their own separate worlds, but blend together in many ways. To continue, the way the poem’s lines are presented also add on to the theme of connections in “Intersecting Lives.” Even though when one clicks on each individual face there are different lines, at the end it always leads back to several sentences such as “hope never left me” and “just waiting for it to go away” that were repeated over and over in a way that seemed to be a visual echo (Sakellion). This “visual echo” that Sakellion portrays shows that even though each person may have different experiences in life, some feelings are universal.

Joanna Sakellion’s “Intersecting Lives” tells a story of three individuals who were touched by death, but shows how they are connected through various symbols throughout her