Month: September 2018

Memory

“Your memory is a monster; you forget—it doesn’t. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you—and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!”

~John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

Saints Layered Like Leaves

My poem from the September Ghost City Review was originally called “Presence.” Fortunately, a very perceptive workshop friend pointed out I was overlooking a better title that was right in front of me.

In its defense, this is where “Presence” (the title not the poem) came from:

“Catholicism is a culture of sacred presence. Relics of saints (pieces of their bodies or objects touched to their bodies); water, soil, or other matter associated with sites of miraculous events; statues, images and crucifixes are all media of presence.”

~Robert Orsi