Jenna Rindo

CONTACT:
5762 Zoar Rd, Pickett, WI 54964
Email:  jennakayrindo@gmail.com

BIO:
I grew up in Virginia and still miss the mountains but have lived in Wisconsin 30 years. I worked as a pediatric intensive care nurse in hospitals in Virginia, Florida and Wisconsin before returning to school for a teaching license and graduate degree in reading. I now teach English to Arabic, Hmong, Kurdish, Vietnamese and Spanish students at elementary schools in Oshkosh. My husband Ron and I raised our blended family of five children on our five acre parcel of land in Pickett.  I write poems and essays to better understand the connections between science and the mysteries around faith, as well as all the complications involved in both health and illness.  

My poems and essays have been published in health related journals such as American Journal of Nursing, Ars Medica, Blood and Thunder: Musings on the art of medicine, Chest, and Healing Muse. I also have work in Calyx, Shenandoah, Comstock Review, Tampa Review, Prism Review, Bellingham Review, Sow's Ear, Verse Wisconsin, WFOP calendars, and Wisconsin People and Ideas Magazine.  I have no chapbooks or full length collections but am grateful to have poems included in several anthologies such as Local News: Poetry About Small Towns, A Call to Nursing, Lavenderia, and Hope is the Thing (forthcoming).

Poetry

Inherent Confession

I was too young to qualify for deep
swimming, drinking, voting or
driving when you died. Now
one-fourth of me rambles confused
without directions and landmarks
to inherited destinations. I got lost
in the back forty acres. You drove
your pickup slowly through the
fields calling my name but I was
too scared to answer. The way you
talked and spit tobacco in dark
fragrant streams astonished me, your
stash of glass whiskey bottles in the
barn behind the horse tack. You
told me to get my nose out of the
books, seemed to hate my fear of riding
without a saddle. Even my long wavy
ponytail, my only notable feature, you
threatened to chop off in the middle
of the night, then exposed your crooked
teeth with a half smile. Somehow you hid
your mix, lived through the “one-drop-rule”
witnessed your granny refuse the
doctor then go completely blind.
Now I make my confession to you:
I have no horse sense, my hands are
soft, I don’t mend barbed wire fences
or rotate the pastures. I suffer the little
children to read layers of meaning
between lines. I arrange words into
sound structures. I get lost within my head.

Natural Bridge 2019

Organic

An electric holiness passes through me as the baby
roots at my right nipple, tender and chapped,
refusing to drain my left breast which festers
warm and red with shame. I must trust my milk
will prosper him though persistent organic pollutants
bond to lipids as fiercely as he latches to me. Our five
acre parcel floats in an ocean of agriculture. We wake
to the whine of crop dusters, smell of pesticide. Still
the land feels wholesome, the deep rooted oaks,
the pharmacology of leaves filtering the air, our fruit trees,
heirloom tomatoes, oregano and mint running past all borders,
our well water filtered of arsenic and nitrates. Nettle stings me,
makes real the Biblical curse of weeds and painful childbirth.

I walk the baby, begging him to fall into a deep sleep
so I can cultivate new poems. The farmer waves to me from
his tractor, he uses genetically modified seed, each kernel
painted with Lindane to deter the Sandhill Cranes. I know
next to nothing about crop loss, the cost of insurance, the yield
required to break even. Each autumn he allows us to glean
his hundred acres. I think of Rachel in the rich fields of Boaz.
The older children drop the ears into five gallon buckets then
count them to see who gathered more. Each winter I impale
the cobs on a nail in the box elder closest to the window,
then watch as Darwin’s squirrels battle over the banquet.

I find an ecology in rejection, repeated, sudden
tiered or standard, the slip of paper almost weightless
in my once hopeful hand, not even a hint of breeze
to blow it out of sight, into the cornfield across the road.
I stand at our mailbox, wooden post tilted precariously
after one too many hits by the snow plow. The corn
stands still in the heat, brewing a sweet so intense it almost
stinks. The batch of poems is now curdled. My heart drips
like buttered corn, gritty with the salt of my mistakes.

Third Wednesday 2016