Synkroniciti is excited to welcome poet Andrea L. Fry from Massachusetts with “Memento Mori,” which won our “Haunting” poetry contest and was then nominated for a Pushcart Prize. The title is Latin for “Remember you will die,” a phrase historically used to spur people into making the most of their lives (sometimes in sensual exploration, sometimes through humility, kindness or innovation, depending on what the beholder and the surrounding culture valued). In contrast, Andrea finds the reminder almost paralyzing as she views the Ossuary in Naples, full of the exposed bones of the dead. “The sight derailed me from my endless doing, halted all my schemes—modest and elaborate—/ for living. As if a lion had entered the room and lay down in front of me to keep me honest.” Guarding and threatening, this symbol of the ineffable and inescapable shepherds us into contemplating our own mortality. Andrea uses bold imagery laced with vulnerability to weave the intellectual with the visceral, and it is the visceral, with a solemn brutality, that has the final word. The poem is comprised of eleven irregular couplets, the final couplet alone being rhymed, as if to signify the end of the scene, and, by extension, the end of life, in Shakespearean fashion.
Read “Memento Mori” in Synkroniciti’s “Haunting” issue, Vol. 6, No. 4, 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.