Cindy Rinne
Cindy Rinne creates fiber art and writes in San Bernardino, CA. Represented Poet by Lark Gallery, LA, CA. Pushcart nominee. Author of Words Become Ashes: An Offering (forthcoming Bamboo Dart Press), Today in the Forest (Moonrise Press), silence between drumbeats (Four Feathers Press), Knife Me Split Memories (Cholla Needles Press) and others. Her poetry appeared or is forthcoming in: Anti-Heroin Chic, Verse-Virtual, LitGleam, and anthologies. You can visit her work at www.fiberverse.com.
Cindy Rinne, “my soul wants to sing” (2021, fiber art), accompanied by the poem “The cycle of incarceration”
The cycle of incarceration
I alone
tread the red circle.
All I want now is my woman back
so my soul can sing.
The body is the offense
guilty of nothing but its born color.
The query beneath
them was ‘why are you alive?’
Circling as hunters aim down on me
while you rise, rise, rise into the blue sky
and meet me over in the next fields.
This circle will be powered by my breath
in hard sunsets, blood that flows black
in the streets. And how many children
have to bleed? Nothing, weeps nothing,
dreams nothing, but my soul
wants to sing.
Cindy Rinne, “ghost moth” (2021. fiber art), accompanied by the poem “Listening”
Listening
After “Corona Blues”
Sharon Davis
Storyteller moon almost rises over granitic rocks covered
in gneiss born 100 million years ago. Pebbles rattle and
shiver in the wind She names those who die
in this contagious death, difficult breath,
across the Navajo nation. Names lost from the reach
of her light. Grieves a sad song as century plants
of succulent gray-green leaves form a basal rosette
with leaves tipped of a hard spine, pierce deeply
and survive Covid-19. They bloom on the 40-foot stalk
with hundreds of fragrant white blossoms in tight clusters. Storyteller listens to the flutter of
moths
on the flowers and sees me walk through the boulders.
I am listening to my friend virtually read ancient stories
that open me to new ideas during the lockdown. I long
to have conversations not on Zoom. After a month, the stalk, thick as a tree trunk, the flowers,
and the whole
plant dies. Underground sprouts allow the ghosts of the plant to spread unseen, to grow anew.
But the death toll keeps rising from invisible droplets. I isolate in my home longing to be around
others with my cheetah mask, social
distancing, and washed hands. Then Loves all Things moon awakens and softly sings sacred
songs to the wind, moths, and stones.