Village Poets will celebrate the month of love with poets, Sarah Maclay & Cindy Rinne, in a presentation of original work on Sunday, February 23 at 4:30 pm at Bolton Hall Museum in Tujunga, CA. Maclay will be returning to Los Angeles from Montana for this performance and renowned fiber-artist/poet Rinne will come to us from her home in San Bernadino.
There will also be an open mic, so please bring your best poems to participate.
The Bolton Hall Museum, 10110 Commerce Ave, Tujunga, CA 91040. Bolton Hall is a Los Angeles Historical Landmark built in 1913. Our reading starts at 4:30 pm and goes till 6:30 pm. Refreshments will be served. This reading is sponsored by Poets & Writers.
Cindy Rinne
Cindy is the author of Dancing Through the Fire Door (Nauset Press), Today on Two Planets (Written by Veterans), The Feather Ladder (Picture Show Press), Letters Under Rock with Bory Thach, (Elyssar Press), Mapless with Nikia Chaney (Cholla Needles Press), Moon of Many Petals (Cholla Needles Press), Listen to the Codex (Yak Press), Breathe In Daisy, Breathe Out Stones (FutureCycle Press), Quiet Lantern (Turning Point), spider with wings (Jamii Publishing), and more. Her poetry appeared or is forthcoming in The Living Poetry Project, Gulf Stream Literary Magazine, Driftwood Press, The Honest Ulsterman (Northern Ireland), The Wild Word (Berlin), Anti-Heroin Chic, The Poetry Barn, Verse-Virtual, LitGleam, Unpsycology (Britian), The Closed Eye Open, Verse-Virtual, Mythos Magazine, swifts & slows, Lothlorien, and anthologies. Her upcoming book is titled Structures Break Down.
Cindy has participated in poetry performances, where she creates the costumes, at the Museum of Art and History in Lancaster, CA; at the Orange County Center for the Arts in Anaheim, CA; The Little Gallery, San Bernardino, CA; Beatnik Lounge, Joshua Tree, CA; Lit Fest in the Dena, Pasadena, CA. She has featured in poetry readings throughout California. Also, in readings connected with AWP across the USA.
Poems by Cindy Rinne
Water Pours from her Hands
A beloved placed this gift,
once soft and alive, tucked in
cold, stiff hands. The solidarity
of marble and her, a statue
clasping dead flowers embraced
in solitude and solace
with gratitude and grace
for the healing glitter of her.
Welcome the Light
I.
Chilled to the bone. I am far
from home with the spirits
of the graves. Elaborate ice
flowers fold at my feet
like stone. Life-size and
hand-carved, she cradles
a bird in winter sun. Ancestor
branches whisper a frozen song.
II.
My guide gives each tree a name—
Eternal Rest Serenity Peace
Recites their lineage stories. This
gingko is 175 years old. She mourns
the broken branches and
knows when the last leaves fell.
oak maple pitch pine beech
owl fox black swans geese
She deciphers the conversations
of animals on well-manicured grounds.
Desires her ashes spread in secret
near the cave when the irises bloom.
Sarah Maclay
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Nightfall Marginalia (What Books Press), a 2023 Foreword INDIES Finalist for Poetry, is Sarah Maclay’s fifth collection. Her fourth chapbook, The H.D. Sequence—A Concordance, is just out from Walton Well Press. Her poems and essays, supported by a Yaddo residency and a City of Los Angeles (COLA) Individual Artist Fellowship and awarded the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry and a Pushcart Special Mention, have appeared in APR, FIELD, Ploughshares, The Tupelo Quarterly, The Writer’s Chronicle, The Best American Erotic Poems, Poetry International, where she served as Book Review Editor for a decade, and elsewhere. She has taught creative writing at USC and LMU, and she offers periodic workshops at Beyond Baroque and privately. She can also be found on “The Poetry of Night,” Poetry.LA’s newest video series.
Poems by Sarah MacClay
The Waters
A brown morning, dawn a singed sky, the day already sepia
below deserted bridges, oars breaking water
near the 16th arrondisement,
a black boat, single rower,
the Louvre goes on for centuries, water climbs the walls:.
it’s a woman standing at the oars
who doesn’t like what she sees ahead
but steers toward it, pointing the vessel west—
west in the desolate quiet
like a vision or a ghost—
through catkins ready to shed their seed,
the silhouettes of skyscrapers,
monolith blocks translucing just beyond cloud,
world gone suddenly thin
as the page of an advertisement—
a cipher for the light show, a screen,
floating along from piazza to plaza to place,
from cielo to ciel to sky,
This is how we wake, at the helm of a small boat—
alone in the city,
alone in time and the artifacts of time and the names
we inherit and learn,
in our white shift,
in an element liquid, viscous, reflective,
as colors from solid objects streak
across what cannot be pinned down—
before the day begins and water
washes its lodge of carrion
against the banks
and the world is almost black and white,
before we’re backlit,
once again, by fire.
First published in Solo. Collected in Whore (U of Tampa Press, 2004)
Rehearsal for Ending
Feathers—
or birds, or leaves
fell slowly into the snow
among the dark thin hounds
and their hunters,
obscuring the wet bark torsos
of the trees,
larger
even than the black-clad
skaters on celadon
ponds, grim as the
morning sky
and melting as,
seconds later,
snow—I’m sure—was floating up—
flakes or white feathers
losing their scant
gravity
as the ice began to burn
along the edges
and the drifts of tulle,
veiling the long grass—
already slowed, elongated—
tangled in muddy clouds of web
as Mahler appeared—
I think it was Mahler
—or something had happened to the air,
echoing the distance among those same
increasing shades of green, in notes
or in what trembles—
something else, something far apart
as the roiling gray of a fishtail-
braided cloud, years
and seconds later
in that pentimento of rain,
grainy and dark
and darkening the distances of green
waters and murky fields
until it seems barely possible to make out
the few abandoned fishing boats
and almost impossible to tell
whether the two tall stalks
are cut-off sails
or the edges of self-pruning cottonwoods
that have grown, in confusing weathers,
up through salt
and through the teal and emerald of
the slippery reeds of shore toward the roiling gray corn
of the clouds in their horizontal twisting above shards of wall
below. And then white moths,
like motes, floating into the star-dark sky,
just as after the box is opened and things fly out
some of them are still alive, and light,
even as the sail-cloak darkens over the body
and the lover extends the fingers again toward the wound, and tries,
and cannot stand.
First published in Manoa - a Pacific Journal of International Writing. Collected in Nightfall Marginalia (What Books Press, 2023)
