“Blessed be sin if it teaches men shame.”
—Georges Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest
This clod-caked taproot tugged from soil
Then rinsed in water clear & cool
Flares like a soul made visible
By sin that’s seen as good once gone.
The world consists of there/not-there.
I choose between each one each hour.
I eat the carrot raw & whole
From tawny tip to fronded crown.
Lanecia Rouse Tinsley, a multidisciplinary artist in Houston, Texas, is director for justice and the arts at projectCURATE and cofounder of the ImagiNoir Group, a think tank of Black activists, creatives, and educators. Rouse Tinsley’s materials—photography, paint, cloth and canvas, ground stone, minerals, paper—play a role not only in the construction of a given piece but in unifying construction with approach, content with context. She is deeply interested in the materiality of her media, and each element speaks—making her work extrasensory for those who engage it.
You know, I said, I’ve often thought life
is a long walk up a sleety street and it’s night.
You know what I mean? And it’s just you and
my goodness, it’s colder than anyone let on.
People pass you but they’re not people. At
the ends of leashes, dogs that are not dogs.
And here and there next to the plots of bones
we keep planting with almost no signs of spring,
steeples point their icy fingers.
O it’s possible to be so lonely so lonely
the soul of your soul can quiver with
how lonely it is possible to be