Synkroniciti is eager to welcome back poet Andrea L. Fry of Massachusetts, who won our “Haunting” poetry contest with Memento Mori, an evocative meditation inspired by the Ossuary in Naples. In Finding Her, a finalist for our “Audacity” Poetry Contest, Andrea turns her gaze toward her late mother, an audacious and difficult woman whose fiery inner life was indecipherable. Was her volatility born of despair, or of a spirit too large for the narrow life it was given? Perhaps both.
“I don’t remember her as god-like on the barnwood stairs/ in her homemade kaftan. In fact, she was frantic for answers,// fueled by some rum left over from the raisin cakes we’d made/ for Christmas. But it wasn’t that. It was how she’d go straight// to the metaphysical and thrash, firing questions/ as she smoked and quoted Blake. Maybe when I was older, no longer living in it.”
The scenes Andrea conjures are intimate and vulnerable, specific enough to avoid cliché, yet familiar in their emotional patterning. Enjambment pulls us forward, fighting against the rigid form of two-line stanzas, never breaking free. The poem closes with a striking image: her mother as a mare chewing her own fetters, injuring herself in the struggle. Like the mare, her mother lacked the language to translate her turmoil and acted out of instinct. As we age and feel aspects of ourselves fall away, possibilities discarded, we recognize that primal thrashing in ourselves, born of weakness and fear.
Read “Finding Her” in Synkroniciti’s Audacity issue, Vol. 8, No. 1, available here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Andrea L. Fry has published two collections of poetry, The Bottle Diggers, in 2017 (Turning Point Press), and Poisons & Antidotes (Deerbrook Editions) in 2021. Her poems have appeared in journals such as Alaska Quarterly Review, Annals of Internal Medicine, Barrow Street, Cimarron Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Stanford Literary Review, The Sun, and Women’s Review of Books, among others. She was a finalist in Georgia College’s Arts & Letters Prize contest, a semi-finalist in the Gulf Coast Prize in Poetry, and a semi-finalist in River Styx International Poetry Contest. She has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize.
She is a freshly retired oncology nurse practitioner and lives in Brookline, Massachusetts with her husband and two comical felines.