Synkroniciti is pleased to welcome back poet Lori Lasseter Hamilton with “Empower Me,” an extremely vulnerable and personal piece about rape. The violence and the physical damage are shocking, but perhaps even more shocking are society’s demands on survivors: forgiveness, pregnancy, even motherhood. What would change if we empowered survivors instead–if we listened to their stories and then gave them the tools to repair what can be repaired? The poem is a vivid indictment of the rapist and the system that aids and abets him. It echoes in the silent places and howls at the injustices.
Read Lori’s important poem in the “Empowered” issue of our online magazine, available here. You can subscribe or order the issue, which debuted September 1, 2022.
Lori Lasseter Hamilton is a medical records clerk for a local hospital in her hometown of Birmingham, Alabama. Some of her poems have appeared in North/South Appalachia, Global Poemic, The Stray Branch, SWWIM, Parousia Magazine, Steel Toe Review, Birmingham Arts Journal, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, and more recently, on Poetry Super Highway.
When she was a little girl, she used to love saying “Green Gremlin” whenever she saw the car on the highway to Panama City Beach during the summer with her family in the 1970s. And when she was in the 9th grade in 1984, she named her diary “Homer” and wore orange tights with an orange mini-dress. She has been married to Robert Hamilton for 18 years.
Please follow Lori on Facebook at “The poetry and spoken word of Lori Lasseter Hamilton.“
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And here is a link to Global Poemic, where “Belshazzar’s Table” was published in October 2020: