Village Poets Features Sarah Maclay and Cindy Rinne on Sunday, February 23

 

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 Rinne is an experimental storyteller and record-keeper of many cultures. Her ethnopoetry is rich with texture and description connecting the ancient/present and the sacred within. Cindy Rinne creates art and writes in San Bernardino, CA. She was Poet in Residence for the Neutra Institute Gallery and Museum, Los Angeles, CA Cindy is a founding member of PoetrIE, an Inland Empire based literary community and a Finalist for the 2016 Hillary Gravendyk Prize poetry book competition. A Pushcart nominee. Rinne creates using poetry, drawing, photography, painting, and fiber art. Cindy attended a residency at Desert Dairy Artist Residency, 29 Palms, CA. She performed “Dancing Through the Fire Door” during the PAMLA conference at UCLA. She was on a panel and participated in three readings at the 29 Palms Book Festival in 2024.    

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                                                        

    

  

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 16^th 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)