Village Poets of Sunland & Tujunga

Monday, September 29, 2025

Katharine VanDewark & Joe Camhi Feature Sunday Oct 26 at Village Poets

Village Poets of Sunland/Tujunga will feature poets Katharine VanDewark & Joe Camhi on the 4th Sunday of October, the 26th, 4:30 pm at Bolton Hall Museum. There will also be an open mic and poets are invited to participate in the open reading segment of the event. The Bolton Hall Museum is located at 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. Free parking is available on the street and also at Elks Lodge 10137 Commerce Ave. Park behind the building and walk a short distance to Bolton Hall Museum across the street and down the block.

Katharine VanDewark’s latest book of poems & original artwork is Dead Calm, Night Heron. She received a BA in painting from UCSB and has had intensive dance training as well as being a photographer. VanDewark’s poems have appeared in many journals including Lummox Number Nine; Last Call, Chinaski!; Amarillo Bay; Dos Passos Review; Wild Violet; Quiddity; Qwerty No. 32; Sanskrit; several Palos Verdes Library Anthologies; Coracle; Spectrum 26; and she is a regular contributor to Bay to Ocean Journal. In 2022 she was the winner of their Crossroads Micro Fiction & Poetry contest in the poetry category. Katharine lives in San Pedro and can often be found walking the cliffs watching for hawks, falcons and foxes.

Dust from Mongolia

Apparently early spring winds sweep

dust from the Mongolian plains

all the way across China

to and beyond Beijing.

I know this because a friend said so.

Millions of people anticipate the

coming wind and chant,

as with the Indian monsoon,

“When the rains come.”

“When the dust comes.”

This has been happening for centuries.

Or at least for years.

How has the grass been uprooted

that soil is picked up easily and

blown for miles?

Are nomads to blame?

Was it the conquering hordes of

Genghis Khan and his horses

that trampled the carpets to dirt and

started the whole thing?

Did they pulverize the blades

playing polo across the steppes, using the

decapitated heads of prisoners as balls?

When the grass grew back and

dew collected on it,

was it red?

Was it the weight of yurt floors

that compacted it and

caused it to die of asphyxiation?

Published in Dead Calm, Night Heron and Lummox Number Nine

Turning ¼ Million Miles

747s took a perpendicular bead

with the San Diego freeway southbound.

They shared longitude

with a 1/3 full moon.

On a planetary seesaw it

had the higher seat to the sun.

A hyperactive finger painting

of clouds close to the horizon

combined with pollutants

heated to 96 degrees

promised a sunset worth watching.

I had been doing a mile

every 5 minutes

when the odometer numbers rolled.

In my neighborhood

those with balconies

sit on them

clink dinner plates and talk.

Here a window outlined in pumpkin lights

there a witch on a chimney

with broom, nylons and hat.

In the blackberry bramble 3 miles away

the unreachables flaunt themselves

unaware that within days

they will no longer be desirable

will become wrinkled

like salt cured olives

sucked free of their dark juice.

Published in Dead Calm, Night Heron

Phantasmagoric

She lets her teeth show, the teeth

that weep blood on weekday mornings.

The teeth she uses to pull up flowering sagebrush

clearing an entire hillside in the time

it takes black ink to turn green.

She lets her lip curl, wrap itself

around the sparkling legs of suntanned

bathers walking innocent

into the waves.

She lets her hair scream, a gathering

brace of funnel winds that sweep

the plains clean of wrought iron beds

tossed like hot air ping pong balls

in beer soaked poolrooms.

She hides her heart

in neighbors’ kitchen trash cans

the rubber belts of Detroit engines

the slide of a tongue over it.

She lets her eyes blister the night

through holds of cargo ships

bound for questionable places

their metal hides slowly eaten through

by liquid gasses.

Joe Camhi has published poetry and fiction in various magazines and Web sites including Exquisite Corpse, the Louisiana Review, Street News, the New Press, and Far Gone Magazine. His plays have been produced by College of the Canyons and in West Hollywood with the Urban Theatre Movement; Santa Clarita; Lafayette, Louisiana; and Portland, Oregon. In NY City, Joe was a featured reader at CBGBs, the Knitting Factory, and the Nuyorican Poets Café where he placed second in one of the semifinals of the poetry slam. Joe Camhi currently teaches English at College of the Canyons and Los Angeles Mission College.

Gwendolyn

Oh spirits, beer, and tears, and wine inside a favorite bar of mine,

I used to come and dine with Gwendolyn. I think

sometimes she’s smiling over there still sitting in that empty chair.

So lonely only by myself and a bit to drink.

Low spirits, drinking hard, regretting, doing shots but not forgetting,

when I walk or dream my eyes begin to tear.

I see a car fly off a curve. I hit the brakes. I try to swerve.

We crash through glass! “Please, waitress, pass another beer.”

I cry and sink another drink and sigh and think and think and think.

The bar is crowded, cramped, and loud, but I’m alone.

Oh, just to have her like before, I’d give up everything and more

to have her now, but now she’s gone. I’m on my own.

That’s when this man, so strangely ugly, stood before me smiling smugly.

Though he drank his drink its level stayed the same.

He sat down in the empty chair. The scent of sulfur filled the air.

He bowed his head, said, “Pleased to meet you. Guess my name.”

His suit was red and shining bright, his skin a foul and pallid white.

I said, “I know your name, and I don’t give a damn.”

He stared me down--his eyes were red. The cocktail waitress came and said,

“What can I do for you?” He ordered leg of lamb.

He laughed, “You seem so sad and nervous, pal. Relax. I’m at your service.

So, your girl is gone, and I know where to get her.

Tell you what I’m gonna do. I’ll resurrect the chick for you.”

He winked. “Although we know God loves us, girls love better.”

And as I had foreseen and feared, a contract, like a dream, appeared

atop the table. He said, “Sign the dotted line.

With just your first name then your last, your hand can write away the past,

and then you sold your soul. It’s yours no more. It’s mine.

This God damned dirty deed then done, so my sole one and only one

now must be waiting in my bed like Satan said.

I’ll touch her silky, milky shoulder, and she’ll turn to me--I’ll hold her,

and make impassioned love with one who once was dead.

Once dead! Cold fear clutched hold of me. Oh, what strange vision will I see?

What ghastly, ghostly, gruesome vision will I greet?

Oh God, a dirty deal was dealt, and dirty feelings were now felt

while walking down a dirty, dark, deserted street.

A half an hour by my door, and then a half an hour more,

just staying, waiting for the fear to just subside.

I thought I never would go in, and then I thought of Gwendolyn.

Then swung the door in wide and quickly rushed inside.

So strange to see her well at first. Oh hell, I thought my body’d burst--

she’s on the bed, her forehead leaning on her hand!

“Are you a figment or a spirit? Speak the truth and let me hear it!

Please speak quickly. Quickly make me understand!”

Her golden, silky hair rolled down her lacy, silky bedroom gown,

rolled down her neck and back and lay across the covers.

“Do you remember when you died? Do you remember me?” I cried.

“Did you forget you were alive, and we were lovers?”

And then I thought my heart was stopping when I noticed teardrops dropping,

dripping, dropping, drying, dropping on the bed.

“Dear, are you sorry to discover you’re alive and near your lover.

Though you’re here, I’m still with fear that you’re still dead.”

My heart was throbbing, madly pounding. She sat sobbing sadly sounding

like we never loved each other once before.

“Are you a figment or a spirit? Speak the truth and let me hear it!

Please speak quick!” I quickly questioned her once more.

She looked up sadly at my face; my heart picked up its pounding pace.

She quivered, cleared her throat, and oh so softly spoke,

“I’m neither figment nor a spirit. We’re together, and I fear it.

We’re the punchline to the devil’s evil joke.”

I cried, “But I don’t understand!” grabbing, gripping, Gwen’s cold hand.

We hugged entwined inside our love now resurrected.

“Stop crying. Wipe away your tears--we’ll be together many years.

My dear, I fear these tears. They’re not what I expected.”

She cried, “You’re absolutely right. We’ll be together for tonight,

and many nights and days and weeks and years and years.

We’ll live together and grow old while we remember what you sold,

and it will haunt us, taunt us, fill our lives with tears.

“See, I was waiting in the sky for you to die, your soul fly by.

I’d greet you, lead you into heaven hand in hand.

We’d live forever paired in death, but, dear, I’m here--you bought me breath.”

That’s when I died inside, I cried, “I understand!”

Now drinking, dreaming every day, I’m paying interest as I pray,

and pray for time, more time, more time for her and me.

You see, I understand too well she’s doomed to heaven, I to hell.

I have her here not there. I sold eternity.

Monday, August 25, 2025

Village Poets Hosts Themed Reading on Sunday, Sept 28 with Poets Cecilia Woloch, Suzanne Lummis & Timothy Steele

The Foothills Poet Laureate, Kathleen Travers, will produce a Village Poets reading based on the historical connection Bolton Hall Museum had with the Utopia Movement in the early 20th century. The reading will take place on Sunday, Sept 28th. Travers has invited distinguished poets Cecilia Woloch, Suzanne Lummis & Timothy Steele to feature. There will be a limited open reading with readers encouraged to read a one minute poem which can be on the theme or not as they wish. The Bolton Hall Museum is located at 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. Free parking is available on the street and also at Elks Lodge 10137 Commerce Ave. Park behind the building and walk a short distance to Bolton Hall Museum across the street and down the block.

Cecilia Woloch is a U.S.-born poet, writer, teacher, and performer based in Los Angeles. Her honors include fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Center for International Theatre Development; her work has also received a Pushcart Prize and been included in the Best American Poetry Series. She has published seven collections of poems and a novel, as well as essays and reviews and her work has been published in translation in French, German, Polish, Hungarian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Hebrew and Romanes. Raised in rural Kentucky, she has traveled the world as a writer and teacher, giving readings, leading workshops at universities and literary conferences,. Most recently, she’s taught creative writing at Sichuan University in China and at the University of Rzeszów in southeastern Poland.

The Summer of 1969

Mary and I grew up fast

to get where the boys were.

I was twelve, she was sixteen, all summer

we shoplifted eyeshadow, costume jewelry, expensive

bikini underpants—treasure we hid in the green attic bedroom

that slanted our house like a ship.

We leaned from those high windows, solemnly

smoking our cigarettes into the dark.

Gypsies, our mother called us, letting us go

with the keys to the Ford.

I was Mary’s Little Sister wherever we went,

instead of my name, the one who followed,

rode shotgun beside her, watching my face in the side-view mirror.

That was the year I started to feel my sharp tongue in my mouth

and my skin had healed.

Mary was blond, with a waist like a funnel, thighs

spilling out of her cut-off jeans

and nothing could stop us—

not Daddy’s strap, not fear, not

Saint Margaret Mary’s, which we had forgotten.

I learned to inhale in the shadows behind

Neville Island Roller Rink; stars squeezed out of factory lights.

Boys I didn’t know, didn’t like,

kissed me in alleys, in strange back seats.

I was twelve, I remember the smells of leather and teeth,

the sense of doom.

By the next summer, Mary was pregnant.

They sent me away to an aunt in Virginia

but it was too late, already, by then;

my childhood was over,

my hair was wild and damp,

the boys in their haunted convertibles beckoned

again and again from the night.

From Sacrifice (1997)

Ghost Sycamore

The winter I knew you weren't coming back,
I ran down the hill from the house, the path

through the woods turning red and gold with death
— dank leaves underfoot; branches twined overhead —

and, breathless, stopped where the lake begins,
having glimpsed, through the tangled mist, a glint

of something glimmering, silvery, bright —
I stepped from the shadows toward that shine

and suddenly, there, in the sky at my feet
on the lake's surface, shimmering, a tree —

or the ghost of a white tree, lightning-limbed,
that seemed to have risen up from within

the body of water, the body of sky —
and again, on the far shore, the other side,

the same tree — spectral, luminous —
bowed as in grief at the water's edge

where it stood among lush pines, bone-white, stark
— stripped of leaves, of rough outer bark —

old sycamore, old boundary-marker —father,
as I saw you in a dream, once, self and other

self, in this world and the next, as if a veil
between them lifted, then everything went still.

From Earth (2015)

Suzanne Lummis' fourth poetry collection will be published this fall by the edgier end of What Books – their imprint Giant Claw – "Crime Wave." She's the editor of Beyond Baroque Books' imprint, the Pacific Coast Poetry Series, and the editor of the just-released anthology, national in scope, Poetry Goes to the Movies. Her individual poems have appeared in New Ohio Review, Plume, The New Yorker, are in the current issue of Poetry Salzburg Review and forthcoming in Rattle. Suzanne’s honors range from Drama-Logue awards and Women in Theater's “Red Carpet Award” to outstanding instructor awards and Beyond Baroque's George Drury Smith Award. She was a 2018/19 City of Los Angeles fellow.

Those Poets Who Write About Loss

don’t tell the whole story,
how all night in your sleep—half
sleep—you throw your net out
towards that place it was last seen,
Loss-Thing. It drags
the parched ground, comes home
with nada, which you must add
to your larder, Nil Queen: nothing on
nothing, a haunting.
If only you could capture two fish, two
silvery slippers to try on for size,
then walk away across water,
start clean. All night you cast,
and its fall, threadbare, makes
a song on the empty air—
the starry net of your wanting.

Interlitq (2020), now LAdige

Medusa 2024
- with a line by Ashley Cooke, student of Bill Mohr

I’m not much for parlor games,
     but if I had cards I’d, you know, lay them
          on the table. I don’t remember much, except
               for the rape—no, first that I was beautiful,
                    then what I want to forget. Snakes aren’t
                         slimy like some think. Neptune was,
                    and weedy from the sea. Gold, marble,
               ivory, cold then wet. Minerva’s temple.
          Salt water in my lungs. In Ovid’s telling
     (if you put your trust in him), enraged
Minerva, victim blamer, made me this.
     Hmm… Could be. There are such women.
          My hair’d been lovely like—
               you know Elizabeth Siddal?
                    Anyway, my hair’d been lovely,
                                                      and now it lived.
               You folks trust Perseus, that naked guy?
          (Naked, if you like Ben Cellini’s take.)
     If so, then he’s a hero, and hero
of this tale. He’ll murder me again.
     These days, mostly, I’m just trying
          to keep it honest, get my story straight.
               Seems to me, they (Who’s They? You
                    tell me) took all the sliding, writhing
               incarnations of the beasties in your world—
        Violence, Envy, Retribution, and oh,
               oh, oh, the Lies… (I could go on)
and attached them to my skull. Boys,
swordsmen, I’ll make you stones,
     pretty ones,
          agate, feldspar, bloodstone,
               tiger eye. Fair exchange, right?

They’re my snakes now.

Poetry Salzburg Review, Spring 2025

Timothy Steele holds degrees from Stanford University and Brandeis University and has taught at Stanford, UCLA and Santa Barbara, USC and California State University, Los Angeles, where he is a professor emeritus and President’s Distinguished Professor. Steele’s five collections of poetry include The Color Wheel and Toward the Winter Solstice. Among Steele's honors are a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Peter I. B. Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Los Angeles PEN Center’s Award for Poetry, a Commonwealth Club of California Medal for Poetry, and the Robert Fitzgerald Award for Excellence in the Study of Prosody.

The Sheets

From breezeway or through front porch screen

You'd see the sheets, wide blocks of white

Defined against a backdrop of

A field whose grasses were a green

Intensity of light.

How fresh they looked there on the line,

Their laundered sweetness through the hours

Gathering richly in the air

While cumulus clouds gathered in

Topheavily piled towers.

We children tightroped the low walls

Along the garden; bush and bough

And the washed sheets moved in the wind;

And thinking of this now recalls

Vasari’s tale of how

Young Leonardo, charmed of sight,

Would buy in the loud marketplace

Caged birds and set them free—thus yielding

Back to the air which gave him light

Lost beauty and lost grace.

So with the sheets: for as they drew

Clear warming sunlight from the sky,

They gave to light their rich, clean scent.

And when, the long day nearly through,

My cousin Anne and I

Would take the sheets down from the line,

We'd fold in baskets their crisp heat,

Absorbing, as they had, the fine

Steady exchange of earth and sky,

Material and sweet.

From Sapphics Against Anger and Other Poems (1986)

The Swing

She shrieks as she sweeps past the earth
And, rising, pumps for all she's worth;
The chains she grips almost go slack;
Then, seated skyward, she drops back.

When swept high to the rear, she sees
Below the park the harbor's quays,
Cranes, rail tracks, transit sheds, and ranks
Of broad, round, silver storage tanks.

Her father lacks such speed and sight,
Though, with a push, he launched her flight.
Now, hands in pockets, he stands by
And, for her safety, casts his eye

Over the ground, examining
The hollow underneath the swing
Where, done with aerial assault,
She'll scuff, in passing, to a halt.

From Toward the Winter Solstice (2006)

Pages

Monday, September 29, 2025

Katharine VanDewark & Joe Camhi Feature Sunday Oct 26 at Village Poets

Monday, August 25, 2025

Village Poets Hosts Themed Reading on Sunday, Sept 28 with Poets Cecilia Woloch, Suzanne Lummis & Timothy Steele