Process Note
Breaking News: These Are Set in Stone began with a pinch—
A news report about the February 28, 2026 missile strike on the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab, Iran would not leave me alone. I am a Meisner-trained actor, and over time that training has fine-tuned what I think of as my pinch and ouch receptors. When something pinches me, such as a news report, an image, a memory, a found text, I respond to it. Sometimes language is the response. Sometimes silence. And sometimes the response is best expressed visually.
This was the case with Breaking News: These Are Set in Stone, the magnitude of this event could only be captured through silence, text, and visual rhetoric.
I see poems cinematically from the beginning. And that is the launchpad for the text. The visual logic came next. Panel One would be full color because the children were alive. Panel Two, the color fades to beige tones. Only the praying girl remains in color to emphasize that among the dead, a few were still alive. Panel Three is black and white because there is nothing left to drain.
Panel One, February 28, 2026 in Concrete, is a concrete poem in which the text forms the outline of a child’s arm and hand. The breaking news, the weapons details, and the fragmenting of schoolgirls are depicted in text that visually represents a fragmented piece of the body, set against a photographic collage of reaching arms, a barren desert landscape, and the near-transparent figure of a young girl. The phrase “what we know now,” borrowed from the way news stories are reported, first details the “stats” of the event. The final line, the unspoken “what we really know now,” giggling little girls reduced to body parts, feet with no toes to tap, arms with no hands to hold.
Panel Two, February 28, 2026, Prayers Unanswered, is a prose poem addressed directly to the Christian God — the God invoked by the government that manufactured and fired the missiles. The few children who survived the first strike were ushered into a prayer room where they likely prayed the Ayat al-Kursi, a prayer of protection in the Quran, which runs through the image of the destroyed school in Arabic. The viewer sees the destruction, reads the text, and understands that their prayers were unanswered. The silent liminal space is where the deed and grief live together.
Panel Three, February 28, 2026, Names & Numbers, gives the victims back their names. The identified victims are named. The Minab Angels Digital Memorial designates the unidentified as Angels — Angel 58, Angel 59, Angel 117, Angel 163. The named and the unnamed are rendered as matryoshka figures / faceless girls in hijab, each one containing nested futures the missiles erased. Two white figures represent Angels yet to be found. The poem holds their space.
The title Breaking News: These Are Set in Stone is itself a confrontation with the news cycle. Breaking news breaks and then moves on. Within days, the Shajareh Tayyebeh school had slipped from the headlines, replaced by the next breaking story. This triptych is an homage to the 167 lives lost and a refusal to let their story fade. These names, these numbers, these prayers — set in stone against the forgetting the news cycle demands.
Cindy Rucker Trost is a writer, actor, and teaching artist based in Los Angeles. Her work explores generational trauma, caregiving, identity, and resilience through hybrid poetry and multi-media poetic expression. Her publications include Tupelo Quarterly vol. 36, where Treading Water was a finalist in the TQ36 Cross-Disciplinary Writing Contest; Tupelo Quarterly vol. 37, The Ropes and Wind Have Eyes, But the Bells Tell the Story; and her latest work, Breaking News: These Are Set in Stone, which will appear in TQ38. Her book reviews have been published by the Midwest Book Review and Action, Spectacle. Additionally, a fiction piece, The Pandemic Rat Race, was published in Drunk Monkeys vol.6 #6. She is the co-author, with Scott Trost, of Good Acting in 500 Words or Less. Cindy serves as Creative Director of the Meisner Institute and teaches acting with the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts’ Creative Aging Program.