Please join Synkroniciti in welcoming back California poet and writer David Holper with “Slam,” a poem about a stray dog who ends up family. The dog appears, dirty and infested with fleas and mange, and follows the narrator home for a bath. Then “It wanders out into the back yard and wails like a banshee,/ like the dead who have come back looking for the ones/ who killed their lovers or tortured their families,/ hoping for a miracle to bring them back./ Your neighbors are yelling from the windows,/ across the fences.” No one can understand why he cares for the dog, why its neediness attracts his attention and love. He tries naming the dog something poetic. Nothing sticks until his partner derisively, and yet cleverly, calls the dog “Slam.” Seeing how other people treat Slam makes him doubt their intentions, even if he does understand them, and pretty soon he’s spending his free time with the dog, who becomes a better friend and partner than any of them. Who has saved whom and what has been recovered?
David gives us a humorous, folksy retelling with dark undertones. Humans are often unkind, and few things show this more readily than how they treat stray animals, particularly those that aren’t healthy or cute. Our cantankerous, gruff narrator sems almost embarrassed by his empathy–as if everyone else is right to be dismissive of Slam–but he is unable to turn this empathy off and leave the dog behind. We are left wondering what we would have done if it had been us. How many times have we turned our back on a creature in need because we didn’t have room for it? David doesn’t ask the question, but he tells such a captivating story that we ask it of ourselves.
Read “Slam” in Synkroniciti’s “Recovery” issue, available for purchase here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
David Holper has published one novel, The Church of the Very Last Chance (Deeper Magic Press, 2024) and three collections of poetry: Language Lessons: A Linguistic Hejira (Deeper Magic Press, 2023), The Bridge (Sequoia Song Publications, 2019) and 64 Questions (March Street Press, 2008). His fourth book of poems, Börd for En, will be out this fall from Broken Tribe Press.
He lives in Eureka, California, where he served as the City of Eureka’s inaugural poet laureate from August 2019-August 2021.He thinks Eureka is far enough from the madness of civilization that he can still see the stars at night and hear the Canada geese calling.