Please join Synkroniciti as we welcome back poet Lori Lasseter Hamilton with “Ritual: A Dictionary Definition,” a heart-wrenching poem that alludes to how society hides away sexual assault, denying people validation and healing. Lori shows us that ritual, society and tradition can work against empathy; Christ himself was murdered by them. The poem is jarring, presenting us with fragments, shards that our minds can reassemble in a myriad of ways depending on the connections we make.
Experience this dramatic poem in Synkroniciti’s “Ritual” issue, Vol. 4, No. 1, available now. Subscribe or purchase the individual issue here.
Lori Lasseter Hamilton lives in Birmingham, Alabama, where, from her phone, she obsessively watches 1980s episodes of General Hospital featuring maniacal cave villains turning diamonds into weather machines and the Australian secret agents who stop them.
In the late 1970s, the pre-teen Lori vacationed with her family and cousins once in a Panama City campground called “Venture Out,” smelling paper mills and watching the first Star Wars movie in a theater to escape the rain. Hyped up on cough medicine after getting a cold, she walked around the campground and sang “Venture Out, Venture Out!” at the top of her lungs, a song that had only ever played in her mind.