If \u00a0you make the connection between this table and that table,
\nthen you will remember your grandmother’s loaves of bread
\nand from there you arrive outside the gates of Jerusalem.
\nYour jealous and unkind aunt Virginia, who is six years older
\nthan you , has made it a rule that you must look at each card,
\neven that one of the lepers. \u00a0Your grandmother knows nothing of this.
\nRotting in rags, their voices crying, “Unclean, unclean.”
\nThe lepers’ lips are eaten away. \u00a0They hold out their stumps.
\nBones come through their soiled wrappings.
\nAnd yet they are odorless on the stereoscopic cards.<\/p>\n
Bread is made twice a week on the scrubbed kitchen table.
\nYou are seven, waiting for the boxed tour of Jerusalem.
\nThe trick of two eyes and two photographs.
\nThen your whole body enters into that place.
\nYou take in your mouth the warm buttered bread
\nfrom your grandmother’s white flowered hands.
\nYou sit with the viewer; waiting to slide into focus
\nthe lettered and numbered cards and to hold
\nfor the rest of your life these cast-out bodies of lepers.<\/p>\n
–Read at St. Lydia’s on January 22<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If \u00a0you make the connection between this table and that table, then you will remember your grandmother’s loaves of bread and from there you arrive outside the gates of Jerusalem. Your jealous and unkind aunt Virginia, who is six years older than you , has made it a rule that you must look at each […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stlydiasliturgy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1161"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stlydiasliturgy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stlydiasliturgy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stlydiasliturgy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stlydiasliturgy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1161"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/stlydiasliturgy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1161\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1163,"href":"https:\/\/stlydiasliturgy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1161\/revisions\/1163"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stlydiasliturgy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1161"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stlydiasliturgy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1161"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stlydiasliturgy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1161"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}