Tissue Memory
by Michelle Ortega
Ortega’s chapbook of poems is a walk through the body’s experience and memory, a small poetic essay in eight parts. It’s surreal in places, like snippets of a dream—recovery, pain, memory, weightlessness in the ocean. Like flashes of silver under churning waves, it offers a glimpse of the interior, a quiet place to hover while the body remembers. (Porkbelly Press, 2022)
Additional Info
EXCERPTS
5. the seahorse anchors on a thin, sparse plant––I press my nose to the glass, watch tiny fins oscillate, keep the top-heavy body upright, trapped in an aquarium what storydoes it tell, is it all the same if the babies are born if food rushes by on a filtered current, I’ve never seen one in the open ocean, does it know the difference
6. this left hip pain, I can’t walk far I can’t fight back, can’t get away, maybe I can walk on my hands like when I was a child––up and down the gentle slope the hard-packed sand on Myrtle Beach before the time I walked upright straight into the ocean and didn’t stop, my 16-year-old body full of vodka; the ocean woke me, threw me back to shore
ABOUT THE POET
Michelle Ortega, MS, CCC-SLP is a licensed speech-language pathologist and founding President of her private practice, Communicare Ltd., Inc. Her writing has been published online and in print, at Tweetspeak Poetry, Casual (an e-book), Tiferet Journal, Exit 13, Shrew LitMag, Contemporary Haibun Online, Snapdragon: A Journal of Healing, The Platform Review, and abroad in Horizon: The Haiku Anthology. Her chapbook, Don’t Ask Why, was published with Seven Kitchens Press in August 2020.
WHAT OTHERS ARE SAYING
Michelle Ortega’s “tissue memory” intertwines images that take you to the ocean, the moon, within your own reflection in a matter of lines. The writer’s thoughts echo your own effortlessly and you leave wondering how so much can be said in few pages. How Ortega plays with time, thoughts and memory while staying present to the characters in the poems gives a consummate picture of the speed in which our inner life runs. “tissue memory” packs within its covers beauty, pain and one’s attentiveness to healing, forgiveness, and letting go.
— Jacinta V. White, Publishing Editor, Snapdragon: A Journal of Art & Healing
Like the poems in Michelle Ortega's Don't Ask Why, the eight prose poems in her new micro chapbook Tissue Memory pull a reader into their own body, asking questions that run from questions as incidental as "will there be traffic" to existential—"which way do I swim." Whether the top-heavy body of the seahorse knows the difference between the ocean and four glass walls, whether the shorts show too much skin, the poems confront the reality of the body and what it might mean to live in one. Reading this short collection is an embodied experience, and I'm torn, uncertain if it's a rich quiet I sense in their wake or if I'm left disquieted. That seems a good thing.
—Will Willingham, Author, Adjustments