Synkroniciti is glad to welcome back Californian poet David Holper with two poems contemplating mortality. “Lessons” speaks of the memento mori experiences Holper had as a child on vacations to Mexico. Experiences in the United States, at least for those who are “privileged,” often seem insulated, as if death were far away from everyday life. In Mexico, death is nearby, be it the barracuda swimming overhead, the sacrificial cenote at Chichen Itza, or the admonishment to get out of the pool as the afternoon storms approach. Holper interprets this as a warning and a kindness, exposing his youthful naïvete to save him the raw pain at the inevitable entrances of death in his everyday life. “You haven’t met him yet, but he’s there./ sitting in la panadería smoking a cigarette, smiling, nibbling/ on a sugar skull for Dia de los Muertos./ In the summer dark of my streets, you’ll smell his stink. Always there, / just at the edge of sight or sense, waiting.“ As safe as we may feel, death, or the risk of it, is a few steps away at any moment.
The second poem, “Another Shark,” compares the modern American epidemic of school shootings to sharks in the pool. He exposes the absurdity and futility of the innocent protecting themselves from shooters: “we are so used to hearing about this/ we know exactly what to do/ we pick up a towel or a flipper and fight back/ duck and cover/ barricade/ run for shelter/ lock the door/ climb in a closet/ pray as hard as we can/ text the people we love/ only none of that works to stop a shark does it.” What is required is nothing less than ensuring that sharks don’t get into the pool and yet no one will do that. As in “Lessons,” Holper shows us that American culture does not tell the truth about death, even when it stalks our children with guns.
Both poems have strong visual, formal elements. “Lessons” is a multi-stanza text ornately sculpted by indentations, while “Another Shark” is in block form–looking at first like a prose poem, but separated with slashes. It’s as if we are looking at a pool and those slashes are the shark fins.
Read Holper’s thought-provoking poems in Synkroniciti’s “Haunting” issue, Vol. 6, No. 4, available 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) and three collections of poetry, Language Lessons: A Linguistic Hejira (Deeper Magic Press), The Bridge (Sequoia Song Publications) and 64 Questions (March Street Press). All of these books are available on Amazon. His poems and stories have appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies.
He lives in Eureka, California, where he served as the City of Eureka’s inaugural poet laureate from August 2019-August 2021.