Forest
Words hide themselves in the reverberation of the forest.
The sun slides through my skin. Like a rebellious goddess,
she arouses me from an invisible drowsiness.
The mystery advances with delirium, amidst the plurality
of voices. A secret lodges itself in the ellipsis.
The dream eclipses my body into yours.
The suns multiply themselves in thousands of eyelids.
Green disguises us as fluid dreams.
We suspend from the lung of the wind.
The burnt stone, our witness, blesses the sacredness
of our name. The seed of touch blindly brings us close
to the foliage of a tree which secretes the scent of time.
We Lie
The earthenware vessel preserves eternity.
We lie in the presence of its smooth walls.
We discover the faces, the names
of nomadic bodies before noon.
We are nomads roaming the cities, erased
in petrified places.
We are the name beyond clay.
We are the gesture beyond silence.
We are the bridge between truth
and the path. We are the awakened dream
of clay. We wander in the movement
of the circle to return as clay
in the earthenware vessel of air and of livable root.
The Woman of Many Names
The woman of many names had no last name.
She held many names from her night wanderings.
One day, she sought the vortex in Sedona.
There she met the Celtic priestess.
The priestess handed her iridescent mud
and the walls of illusion fell apart.
Her palm held the crucifix of destiny.
The woman of many names imagined
the world with a different first name.
The body, which had many barriers,
started to fall apart. And the clarity
of the mirage turned into desert sand.
She floated in that body until she could touch
the uncontainable waves of the sea.
Finally, the woman of many names
started to discover herself, because she did not want to live
without knowing herself; nor die without knowing the sea.
—
Ivonne Gordon Carrera was born in Quito, Ecuador. A poet, essayist, translator, and literary critic, she is the author of Cuerpos de Ceniza (forthcoming), Meditar de sirenas (Sweden), Barro blasfemo (Spain), Manzanilla del insomnio (Ecuador), and Colibríes en el exilio (Ecuador). Her work has been published in several poetry anthologies and journals in the United States, Uzbekistan, Latin America, Europe, Africa, and elsewhere. She earned her PhD in Latin American Literature from UC, Irvine and is Professor of Latin American Literature at the University of Redlands.
Cindy Rinne is an artist, writer, and translator living in San Bernardino, CA. She is the author of Quiet Lantern (Turning Point), spider with wings (Jamii Publishing), and Breathe in Daisy, Breathe out Stones (FutureCycle Press, forthcoming) and co-author, with Michael Cooper, of Speaking Through Sediment (ELJ Publications). Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Sea Foam Magazine, Blue Heron Review, Gulf Stream Literary Magazine, Driftwood Press, The Honest Ulsterman (Northern Ireland), The Whirlwind Review, Birds Piled Loosely, and elsewhere. She is a founding member of PoetrIE, an Inland Empire based literary community.