Spring in Bloom with Poets Elsa Frausto & Sean McGrath

 

Village Poets will celebrate the warmth of spring with a presentation of original poetry by Elsa Frausto & Sean McGrath on Sunday, April 27 at 4:30 pm at Bolton Hall Museum in Tujunga, CA. There will also be an open mic, so please bring your best poems to participate. The Bolton Hall Museum, 10110 Commerce Ave, Tujunga, CA 91040. Bolton Hall is a Los Angeles Historical Landmark built in 1913. Our reading starts at 4:30 pm and goes till 6:30 pm. Refreshments will be served. 

 Elsa S. Frausto, the eighth Poet Laureate of Sunland Tujunga (2014-2017) was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She has lived in the Foothills with her family for over twenty-five years. Her work has appeared in a number of local and international publications, among them Porte des Poetes, Speechless the Magazine, Poem of the Month in Poet at Work, Badlands, the anthology Meditations on Divine Names and many anthologies by Poets on Site. She was the coordinator and host for Camelback Readings held at the Sunland-Tujunga Library. Elsa is a member of the Chuparosa Writers, volunteers at the Friends of the Library Bookstore and at the Noise Within Theater (Pasadena) and is poetry editor and translator for the Spanish language literary magazine la-luciernaga.com.  Her venture as Poet Laureate of Sunland-Tujunga (2014-2016) was the blog Poetria.org. Her local musings Walking Around could be read monthly in the local paper, Voice of the Village.  In 2017, her book, Sunland Park Poems, co-written with Alice Pero was published by Shabda Press.

 Poems by Elsa Frausto

If I could do with the night…

 If I could do with the night

what the choreographer

with the dance.

Undress it of its dictionary,

surprise her moonless.

A crackle of grasshoppers

and an absence of frogs

in the air at eleven,

to the rhythm of a hand

on your hips

and yours on my breast.

If I could do with the night

what it does with me.

Dance without a choreographer,

full moon like once your mouth

on the roundness of mine.

And a second after eleven

the total silence of grasshoppers.

 For you, who know everything

What will be left of this time

a year from now or on my 65th birthday?

The walks and how the wind seemed to come

out of nowhere.

Your body when I bathed it clean

to insult the illness in it,

call it out of you, to show its face.

The one it hides around your heart.

A stone, a beating stone, so sick,

so alive.

Two poems written in the back of books.The first book by a Russian poet imprisoned in Soviet times- Yuli Daniel

Poet,

you left enough pages for me to write on.

It’s past one

and I don’t sleep,

the same way cold and hunger kept you awake.

Thoughts can be jails

with bars on all sides.

I peer out into the night

like a bird

undeserving of the name.

The second book is by Wallace Stevens

Once my father was young.

Once we walked on Sunday

to buy a paper at the stand

on the corner of Hollywood and Western.

It’s not there anymore.

Memory of you

Question I will never ask-

How many years for your hair to grow that long?

Maybe I did and don’t remember.

You could have answered me like this-

I trimmed it every new moon since I had you at 19

until I turned 30. You spread out in its thickness

and the night built nests of light in its waves.

But you wouldn’t have said that.

Those weren’t your words, you didn’t say the rest either

because I never asked you.

Maybe I did. One doesn’t remember everything.

Sean McGrath is a poet, writer and teacher who has resided in the Northeast and the Southwest of the United States. He has published three poetry collections — Untitled Baby Project (2023), From a Balcony in Palos Verdes (2022), and Oculus (2016) — and is working on his fourth, Untitled Baby Project 2.0. His poetry has appeared with the California State Poetry Society and Awakenings Review. He received a B.A. in English from Brown University in 2011. Sean has been teaching literature and writing classes at Chadwick School in Palos Verdes, California for the past eight years and he currently resides in Torrance with his wife, their two young sons, three dogs, and a cat. 

Poems by Sean McGrath

At Sea, After Light

The marine wall poured onto the coastline

  this evening’s moving mountains—

went the sailboats, went the doves,

  lines of sunset streaked through

like tunnel paths for the seagone.

 More boats, droves of pelican and cranes

fleeting from sight, making their winged exit;

  the air was wet with longing.

I shivered on the shore

  underdressed, ill-equipped to harness

all the heaven before me,

  so much of it leaking out,

coming in at once.

I can’t have a cold room when it knocks—

  I should have fire in my lungs

and only a little fear in my heart,

  I should learn to warm myself

amid the wavery sea,

  to be still in the absence of light.

Published in “from a Balcony in Palos Verdes” (wor(l)ds publishing)

hunger for eternity

you ever miss something

even when you are beholding it

right there in your dumbstruck eyes?

it had been close during

the goldfleeced autumns in Massachusetts,

the sunsets in Redondo,

the winters from a balcony in Palos Verdes

when snow had just started to top the distant Angeles

but never so distilled,

not until this little monster

crash landed on my pumping heart

and looked back at me with my own eyes—

then, as before, every moment felt worth holding onto forever

then, like never, each moment felt like it was rushing away

so this is how you fall out of love with the ordinary,

I thought,

this is how the hunger for eternity grows

Published in “Untitled Baby Project” (2023) 1^st prize winner CSPS Monthly Contest March 2024

Car Poem #2

I hadn’t thought

  it would be so much time circling

parking lots,

  it would be so much time in the rocking

chair with his paws latched onto the neck of my shirt

  in the dark hours of morning,

 so much time chasing him around

knocking rocks out of his mouth,

   chasing him around with a tissue to get his nose,

     so much time sharing colds,

I hadn’t thought—

 

     I guess I had little interest in forecasting

the future.

     I lived one page at a time, trusting

it was a good book probably, and no

need to skip ahead.

 

    The last chapter was all

beer glasses and long runs, longer drives,

coastal shores and a wife worth every

   mile.

 

Some days I wonder

  is this a punishment

    or a reward

  for all that good living?

maybe both

     and probably neither,

it is just a life,

   hardly a page turner,

      to extend that metaphor—

  though a stone on the beach

may be more fitting,

   something tractable

   and battered slowly and certainly

by the endless waters

  which then

    dust by dust it becomes

part of and maybe remains;

 

I’m not sure, it’s all so uncertain

and I hadn’t thought

    to give it much good thought

 until now with a life more precious than mine

asleep in the backseat.

Published in The Awakenings Review (Spring 2024)

 

 

 

 

Tresha Faye Haefner & Thomas A. Thomas Feature at Village Poets on March 23

 

On Sunday, March 23, 2025, we welcome two poets from outside of Los Angeles, Tresha Faye Haefner from the East Coast & Thomas A. Thomas from the Pacific Northwest. We look forward to a spirited event. The reading will take place at at 4:30 pm at Bolton Hall Museum in Tujunga, CA. 

There will also be an open mic, so please bring your best poems to participate.

The Bolton Hall Museum, 10110 Commerce Ave, Tujunga, CA 91040. Bolton Hall is a Los Angeles Historical Landmark built in 1913. Our reading starts at 4:30 pm and goes till 6:30 pm. Refreshments will be served

 

                                                 Tresha Faye Haefner

Tresha Faye Haefner’s poetry appears, or is forthcoming in several journals and magazines, most notably Blood Lotus, Blue Mesa Review, The Cincinnati Review, Five South, Hunger Mountain, Mid-America Review, Pirene’s Fountain, Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, Radar, Rattle, TinderBox and Up the Staircase Quarterly. Her work has garnered several accolades, including the 2011 Robert and Adele Schiff Poetry Prize, and a 2012, 2020, and 2021 nomination for a Pushcart. Her first manuscript, "Pleasures of the Bear" was a finalist for prizes from both Moon City Press and Glass Lyre Press. It was published by Pine Row Press under the title “When the Moon Had Antlers” in 2023.  Find her at ThePoetrySalonStack.Substack.com

Three Poems by Tresha Faye Haefner

So Much Wine is Poured

 Back into the bottle,

The fight can’t remember what it was about anymore.
Car tires screech backwards into the garage. The T-shirts on the front lawn fly back
into the closet. The suitcase falls backward onto the bottom shelf.
Windows reassemble, unbroken in the garage.
The husband’s old chest recedes into a new shirt.
Men become so young you can see the funerals in their eyes
go back to friendships.  The failures pour out of their shoes like sand.
The wives fit into wedding dresses. Flowers remember their old bouquets.
The church bells ricochet so loud they drown
out sound of creaking chairs.
And you can taste the lost wedding cake, made of rose petals and lemon,
melting, like a forgotten light, on the tongue.

Originally Published in Radar

#BestLife

Go ahead. Quit your job

or stay. Shuffle papers in a cubicle

or hang a hammock next to a lake.

Wherever you go darkness will follow.

And so will light.

You can be miserable swimming

under a waterfall,

Or go into ecstasy when someone plays

Mozart next to the copy machine.

You beautiful donkey. Dumb angelfish.

Stop flipping the channel.

It doesn’t matter what you sing about.

Just open your mouth,

wherever you are,

and sing.

Ode to the (Current) North Star

All night the North Star governs our lives.
A cosmic light-house
guiding the sailors and the astronauts. Making poets
quiet and thoughtful.
But in 13,000 years the earth will tilt, and we’ll all turn
to birds again, following the tail end of the constellation.
Polaris will lose its importance. The way old ideas
get overthrown and replaced with new hungers.
By then we’ll be long dead. Our body parts recycled into oceans
and water bottles. New generations drinking
our old tears. Still, it feels small and quotidian to be alive.
The way the stars align every night,
making something as ordinary as a belt for Orion, or a dipper
anyone can drink from.
A big bear and a little one pointing
their noses in the direction of the night’s cold pollen.
As if the sun is just one stain of honeycomb, ministering us around and around
as we circle towards something. But who can say what?
When I was younger I expected my life to be sweet, a long lick of the lollypop
of languages and travels, piano music and poetry,
but yesterday the sun set and took with it
a kind of bliss I didn’t know I had. I felt the cold weight of my mortality slide
back and forth, like mercury in a thermometer.
Did anyone ask the dinosaurs if they were ready to die?
The stars if they wanted to become bear and black swan?
The mastodons go extinct. The murder swan loses its claws and becomes just another bird.
Even the North Star, which I thought was constant, will become a lie.
And we’ll have to reinvent our stories again,
little lost cygnets
looking at the tail end of a featherless star.

Winner of the Pangea Prize

                                                           Thomas A. Thomas

Thomas A. Thomas, poet & photographer, was born in Illinois, but has gratefully lived in the Pacific Northwest for more than 43 years. His newest poetry collection was published June 1^st, 2024. “My Heart Is Not Asleep” from MoonPath Press is a sort of memoir in poems, the journey of falling on love with, then finding resilience while losing his beloved to early onset Alzheimer’s through the slow course of many years. His poetry, photographs and videos appear online and in print, most recently in MacQueen’s Quinterly and Verse Daily, as well as in the July ’24 Tupelo 30/30 Project. His work is also found in Gyroscope Review, Cirque Journal, Blue Heron Review, Vox Populi, The Banyan Review & FemAsia Magazine.com, as well as in anthologies in English and Serbian and in translation to Spanish, Serbian, and Bengali. In addition to his previous Pushcart and Best of the Net nominations, Thomas has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize and Best Spiritual Literature anthologies for 2025.Thomas gives great thanks to Cultivating Voices Live Poetry, and to the University of Michigan, where he had an auspicious beginning with Donald Hall and Gregory Orr.Numerous works and interviews are listed on his Linktree page: https://linktr.ee/thomasathomas

                                         Three Poems by Thomas A. Thomas

 Instead of god

say heron, say kingfisher,

say that was the tenth summer

my wife was dying and I
was not.

Instead of god say
a name, like Ann or Grace
or Joy, say the one who broke

me open in a new way this

wholly unexpected time.

Instead of god say love
let joy in the side door and she

sits in the kitchen now in the

warmth of fresh bread and

cinnamon and honey.

Instead of god say only
desire, want, say pomegranate,

poplar tree, say stay, say please,

say thank you, say love again

dark and light and forever.

 Published in The Banyan Review (Spring 2021, Issue 5)

That time by the river

It was summer, early,

or perhaps spring

late; all time,

and no time,

hours or an eternity,

time like torrents of snowmelt, roaring

and whispering, both. The water

carrying starlight down

from the high peaks;

time slow, like blossoms

opening in their time, wild

rose, daisy, lupin, paintbrush.

Our human time was not carnal,

was incarnate, our intimacy like

the spotted sandpipers’ tender probing

among shining rocks at the river’s edge

for nymphs and larvae, sustenance

plucked from cold clear joy.

Our kindnesses showed a higher love

as the blue heron paused

on a dead branch of a snowing

cottonwood tree, as our bodies rested

on the bank below, as cedar waxwings danced

from snag to sky, caught sparkling

insects in the silent air’s sunlight

above the singing rush of water that

spilled toward its calmer home.

And a fritillary alit, sunlit, alight

and spinning its dance on the yellow

heart of a daisy for us… or not for us, just

there: red, gold, orange, and silver afire,

as wings opened and closed, not in sorrow, nor

joy, not in acceptance or forgiveness

or surrender or anything that calls

for earthly tears, just there before us,

below the peaks so high above, above

the river sparkling past, day into night, as

wind stirred the trees above it, lifted our eyes

beyond our eyes to the currents that move the stars.

 Published in Cirque (Vol. 13, No. 1, 2023)

A Kind of Prayer for My Bedridden Wife

 —After David Whyte

 As the fourteenth year of your disability

and the twenty-second year of our marriage

comes to an end, here are some words I say

for you, my bedridden wife, every visit, though

we neither can say you know my meaning:

Perhaps what we call death is actually an

abrupt waking, I whisper, for which we are

all preparing. I do pray that even eyes-closed

and mouth-speechless, you are doing this.

After all our years, the struggle along our path,

I hope when you finally tire enough of dying,

you shall discover that you may live there,

on the other side of death, that there is love

on the other side of death, and you will find

the strength to walk across death’s dark

territory, however fluid and dangerous it seems,

to find at last that one light that belongs to you.

Published in MacQueen’s Quinterly, Issue 25 September 2024

                                                                 ~~~~~