Happy New Year 2013!



A New Year 2013

Just past the midnight hour -

New Year begins to flower

amidst high expectations,

cheers and celebrations!

We embrace the new with

resolve to keep promises

made, as days fade into

the patterns of our lives.

Dorothy Skiles, 12/28/12
7th Poet Laureate of Sunland-Tujunga

(C) Copyright 2012 by Dorothy Skiles

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Happy New Year 2013!

from Village Poets of Sunland Tujunga

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Haiga "The Gift" (c) 2012 by Maja Trochimczyk, created for

a New Year Exhibition at the Japanese American Museum in Los Angeles

Ever calling - Never heard

Ever seeking - Never seen

Revealed

Detail from "The Gift" (c) 2012 by Maja Trochimczyk

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New Year

           

A new palette, blue-white,

fresh brushes with no tint

That long season,

that whole year

blanketed itself

over the backs of colors.

Those were the yesterdays,

A child’s red dress

stitched by great-grandmother

shimmered on her skin

beside the greens of Maui’s sea

and lavender hills of sunset,

mixing up to something odd.

Tubes of paint lie fresh

not yet opened

You were dressed in black

smart and slim

every day of the year,

and now I wonder

what your face would say

if I would give you

a sun-yellow sweater

edged in gold.

The new season has begun,

bright, clear and golden.

These are the days to remember.

Burnt umber is a fine beginning.

Over that a springtime tree.

~ Marlene Hitt

(c) December 1999

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Floating Holidays

The fourth Thursday in November

The last Monday in May

The twenty-fifth day of Kislev

The first Sunday

Following the first full moon

After the vernal equinox

The second new moon after the winter solstice

Unless there is an 11^th or 12^th intercalary month,

In which case it starts on the third new moon

I much more prefer the holidays that occur on a regular date

Especially those that fall on the 1^st

Steadfast and constant, dependable

Something you can anticipate

Primo, numero uno

Back to basics, square one

A built in chance to see things through clear eyes

A time to hail new beginnings

Salute the dawn of self improvement

And pose exalted on a rock of resolutions

A time to reel in that fish and rid the monkeys from your back

To wage battle against your apprehensions

Subdue your inhibitions

And vanquish your constraints

To finally stop procrastinating once and for all

Or least start thinking about it.

Yeah,

A clean slate

A fresh start

Another chance to finally get it right

Joe DeCenzo

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Time

A vacant pause while the traffic of your life speeds by.

Funny, time is really meaningless

Until you appreciate how much of it you’ve used.

It’s a shock when you first realize

You have fewer days ahead than behind.

Time is tender, so tender that we should cradle each day in our arms

So we can breath its presence, ignore the clocks and accept the moments.

We should smell and touch and taste each minute

Then set it free to make room for the next.

Time is opportunity,

The chance to experience all that occurs in an instant

Or endure the eternal echoing regret;

The chance to extract the sweetest citrus

Or let the rind grow sour at hand’s neglect;

The chance to arrest the fleeting glance

Or let the heart lay fallow on a field of indecision.

Time is for doing.  And those who do nothing,

Always seem to be running out of time.

Joe DeCenzo

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Happy Gnu Year 

By Mari Werner

The gnu is a large antelope that

inhabits the African plains

from Kenya to northern South Africa.

Gnus are grass eaters.

From the viewpoint of a blade of grass,

no gnus is good gnus.

However, gnus are very inventive.

They have developed a process

for making a special kind of paper,

which they call gnus paper.

They’ve also invented a particularly

effective broom. A gnu broom

sweeps clean.

Gnus have sophisticated social customs.

Some gnus prefer mornings

and some prefer evenings,

so they stay awake at different times

and watch over each other.

The evening gnus watch

the morning gnus and the morning gnus

watch the evening gnus.

Gnus have historically formed tribes,

the first of which was the Hoo Gnu.

Later came the Yew Gnu and the Aye Gnu,

which eventually merged to form the Wee Gnu.

Because of their many fine qualities,

gnus were recently honored by being

added to the Chinese zodiac.

The year 2013 was declared

the year of the Gnu.

May your gnu year be filled

with smiles and good gnus.

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Poems (c) by the respective poets
Photos (c) 2011-2012, by Maja Trochimczyk

Holiday Wishes 2012 and Elsa Frausto on January 27, 2013

VILLAGE POETS OF SUNLAND TUJUNGA

WISH ALL POETS AND POETRY LOVERS

HAPPY, HEALTHY, AND INSPIRED HOLIDAYS 2012!

Dorothy Skiles, Joe DeCenzo, Marlene Hitt, and Maja Trochimczyk

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ELSA S. FRAUSTO - FEATURED POET ON JANUARY 27, 2013

On January 27, 2012, at 4:30 p.m., at Bolton Hall Museum in Tujunga, CA, (10110 Commerce Ave, Tujunga, CA 91042) Village Poets present the poetry of Elsa S. Frausto.

Elsa S. Frausto's work has appeared in many local and international publications, among them Porte des Poetes, Speechlessthemagazine, Poem of the Month in Poets at Work, Badlands and Poets on Site. She was the coordinator and host for Camelback Readings held at the Sunland-Tujunga Library. She has been a member of the Chuparosa Writers for many years and is Poetry Editor and Translator for the Spanish language literary magazine la-luciernaga.com

Poetic matter is not expressed by means of words. It has neither form nor content for the simple reason that it lacks existence outside of the work.
                  ~   Osip Mandelshtam

Good writing is like speaking. A speaking that echoes against walls, then within them.
       Poetry- the word on the other side- behind the word- if words are three dimensional.
                     ~   Elsa S. Frausto

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Body Double

Bedroom on the second floor.
House steady in the wind
like night with held breath.
Step outside, get a good view.
That's me inside looking out.
Me outside looking in.
The window blinds accordion the light.
Outside, the same wind plays patty-cake
with my hair. Inside, I laugh at the sight.

Elsa S. Frausto

Lois P. Jones at Bolton Hall on November 25, 2012

On Sunday, November 25, 2012 at 4:30 p.m. at Bolton Hall Museum in Tujunga, CA, (10110 Commerce Ave, Tujunga, CA 91042) Village Poets present the ellusive, inspiring and seductive poetry of Lois P. Jones.

Lois P. Jones is host of Southern California’s "Poets Café" (Pacifica Radio, KPFK 90.7 fm in Los Angeles), and co-produces Moonday West and Moonday East’s poetry readings in Pacific Palisades and La Cañada, Flintridge, California. She is the Poetry Editor of Kyoto Journal and the administrator of Penshells, an on-line poetry workshop forum.  She has published in American Poetry Journal, Qarrtsiluni, Sierra Nevada Review, Askew, Raven Chronicles and other journals in the U.S. and abroad and is a three-time Pushcart nominee.  

She considers herself a devoted but amateur photographer with photographs published in several literary journals.  Her poems have won honors under judges Kwame Dawes of Prairie Schooner, Fiona Sampson of Poetry London and others.  New Yorker staff writer, Dana Goodyear selected "Ouija" as Poem of the Year (2010) in the competition sponsored by Web Del Sol.  She is the winner of the 2012 Tiferet Poetry Prize and will be featured in The Tiferet Talk Interviews, which includes conversations with Robert Pinsky and Julia Cameron forthcoming winter 2012. 

We come to painting, to poetry, to the stage, hoping to revive the soul. And any artist whose work touches us earns our gratitude.  - Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World.

 

Shema!

Listen!, the Rabbi says, God is One. Listen for what comes next.

When death arrives shema is a mezuzah on the threshold

of your lives, the soul's last words before leaving a body.

But I no longer hear the hawk’s cry above the fields

where you left us. I can no longer count all the bones

that have buried themselves in me. Only the rabbi's voice,

this stranger who entered the last ten minutes of a life

when the daughters and all their hours could not give the word

to let you go. A woman who spoke past tubes and sheets,

beyond a face swollen from the fall and the eyelids sealed

past opening. She told you what a good job you’d done,

forgave all the secrets--the locked drawers finally open —

their invisible contents drifting into the clinical air. Her words,

the blood moving through us as we held hands – the road

and the river as we felt you pass, not so heavy as a song,

not even snow on the bough melting. I listened, I watched

you were so silent mother, I could not hear you leave. 

  

Published in The Tiferet Journal and the anthology,

Meditation on Divine Names (Moonrise Press, 2012)

Birthday

Who knows the birth of a firecracker?

          I hear they roasted bamboo to create a sound

loud enough to scare away ghosts.  The rods sizzled

          and blackened, then popped.  At the end

of the Song Dynasty the first manmade bursts -- gunpowder

          in a paper tube until they’d learned to string them

with hemp.  Now they could hear them all at once –

          the hundred-break crackers crackling in the night,

exciting a burn in the heart’s moist chamber. 

          I was too young for explosions.  For me,

there was only longing, a sparkler in the dark,

          a flare of fireflies built to last a moment.  My small arm

spinning a circle of light, a golden diadem I could wear

          like a fairy princess, never knowing dreams escape

as alchemy.  That time is not trapped beneath

          a crystal dome but a night of humid air, the black snake’s

smoke and hiss as it curls out of the tablet,

          flares into a pharaoh’s serpent as we watch charmed

in the alley.  My sister kneeling on cement, snapping the paper

          roll caps with a sharp rock as our noses stung with sulfur. 

We were rockets fired from a glass Coke bottle, the pyrotechnic

          possibility of flight.  A joy of a country being born

believing that beginnings are possible.   I thought  it was all

for me, born on a day when the night splinters,

            aflame in wonder, unconcerned with what occupies the dark. 

Published in Arsenic Lobster – nominated for Best New Poets.

In Full Bloom

after Peter Shefler’s
“Chinese Magnolia Branch In Full Bloom”

You have made her mostly magnolia.
As if a tree could rise from nothing

but a glance.  That’s how it goes.
Like dipping hands into a cistern,

the cold clear night has left its awakening
afloat on the ridge, petals

opening to this one sweet thought. No,
not opening, slipping from her shoulder

like a pale chemise after a night of rain.
You have made her mostly magnolia,

pressed her as sleep into a thousand pages.
Thin as a map of untraveled happiness.

Time is a skyward thing, quiver
of an Empress-veil painted into stillness.

Butterflies ask no questions.  In their short lives
they have flown their destinies

It's how you made her:  the breath
and scent of things impossible to keep.

Published in Sierra Nevada Review

Stephen Linsteadt - Featured Poet on October 28!

After a wonderful and inspirational reading by the incomparable Sharmagne Leland St. John, the Village Poets have another poetic delight planned for October. Painter and poet Stephen Linsteadt and poet Maria Elena B Mahler have been scheduled to read their work and present a new book of poetry inspired by Stephen paintings on Sunday, October 28, 2012, at 4:30 p.m. at the Bolton Hall Museum in Tujunga, California (10110 Commerce Avenue, Tujunga).  Poets who have contributed to the Woman in Metaphor book of painting and poetry are encouraged to come and read their work from the book during the Open Mike segments of the afternoon.

We regret to inform you that due to our scheduling error Maria Elena B Mahler will not be able to appear at this reading, which was initially planned for October 21, 2012. Instead, she will be invited to return at a later date. On October 28, Maria Elena will be with us in spirit and will be represented by a couple of poems read by others.

Stephen Linsteadt is a painter, poet, and writer. He is the co-author of The Heart of Health; the Principles of Physical Health and Vitality. His latest book is titled Scalar Heart Connection. His poetry is published in Moments of the Soul (Spirit First), Solstice, Cradle Songs (Quill & Parchment Press), Saint Julian Press, Poets on Site, and others. His paintings have appeared in Reed Magazine, Badlands Literary Journal, and Birmingham Arts Journal and can be seen at StephenLinsteadt.com. His most recent project is an anthology of poetry based on his paintings, Woman in Metaphor.  A sample poem from the book is reprinted below.

Maria Elena B Mahler’s poetry has been published in English and Spanish in Badlands, Solstice, Quill & Parchment, Global Alchemy, Saint Julian Press and Poets on Site. She was a finalist for the 2011 San Francisco-based Primer Concurso de Poesía Latinoamericana en Español, and is published in the anthology by Colectivo Verso Activo. Recently, her work was also selected for the Spanish anthology Se Buscan Quijotes, published by El Centro de Estudios Poéticos in Madrid, Spain.

Maria Elena also co-authored the non-fiction book The Heart of Health (Truth Publishing Co.) and enjoys writing fiction. She was raised in the South of Chile. After graduating with a degree in Communications, she lived and worked in Mexico and Canada, and finally settled in the Sonoran Desert of Southern California in 2003.

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Stephen Linsteadt

Saint-Rémy de Provence

A wale of rock jumps out of the land

and freezes above the earth;

the backdrop to “Starry Night”

painted close to where green bathed

the artist’s vision in a yellow

            tainted room.

The scent of Languedoc

still warm about your neck.

           

Thunder uncoils over the night.

Rain on my umbrella

drops of deep mystery. Madness in May

only warm iris blossoms understand.

Their light whispers

and won’t hold still.

You can’t complain that I’m singing

            this is an asylum.

And where are the human beings

who once lived in the olive groves?

We were compelled to keep our distance

            from the chapel.

Pigeons cooed then waited

for the echo to reverberate

off its stained glass walls.

 

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Maria Elena B. Mahler

 

 

La Machi       

Nobody knows her name, only the color of her skin.

If I had a photograph of her face

it would be sepia cracked by the storms over Mapuche land.

Her eyes would be dark stones of lava and

her hair flowing rivers of molten core.

Above Alerce forest, pumas draw the circle.

In my dreams I have seen her chewing chamico.

Along Chilean valleys, water runs horizontal

spoiling the virginity of Andean snow, where la Machi

got sweaty under the Araucaria tree.

His mal de ojo broke her spell.

Their passion over the still wet moss was all they had

between them.

The impediment to their holy union wasn’t the raven in her hair

but the bonds of duty as la chamana:

           forbidden to leave the underworld.

Breaking the sacred law meant certain death

so she quietly gave up her fruit:

    first a boy

    then a girl — my grandmother.

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Mariano Zaro

                        Portrait and Still Life with Art

I got married because I didn’t know how to say no.

                        I did not know I could say no, just like that.

                        You spend your life trying not to hurt people.

                        Maybe it was shame.

                        They say shame is premature exposure.

                        They say shame is the seed of all self-destruction.

                        We got married, it was the thing to do.

The next day

I knew I had made a mistake.

It was too late.

And when you talk to people about it—

well, I did not talk about it with many people,

just this old woman from the warehouse,

they tell you that is normal, that you feel strange

when you get married, in the beginning.

I wanted to talk to people about it

but everybody was too busy,

we were all busy trying to survive.

This happened when everything was there for me to have.

She stops talking, looks at the toast.

I don’t blame anybody.

Don’t blame myself.

Now I look back and it’s all there.

I don’t want to make it nice.

I don’t like sweet, I already have told you.

I know it’s all there. I can breathe.

She picks up tiny crumbs,

presses the tablecloth with the tip of her ring finger.

We leave the hotel.

I can hear the sound of her shoes—

the sound she liked so much

at seventeen.

I can hear the sound of her shoes on the floor.

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Photos from the Reading:

https://picasaweb.google.com/100602334921816625334/VillagePoetsStephenLinsteadt

 

Sharmagne Leland St. John - September 23, 2012 at Bolton Hall

We are thrilled to welcome the wonderful Native American poet Sharmagne Leland St.John as Featured Poet of the Village Poets Monthly Reading at Bolton Hall Museum on September 23, 2012 at 4:30 p.m.  The event also includes an open mike for poets and refreshments served courtesy of Marlene Hitt and Mari Werner. A hat will be passed to collect funding for the hall's renovations. The Bolton Hall is located on Commerce Avenue in Tujunga California  and it is hard to miss - the only building of river-stones among a sea of stucco. 

 

Sharmagne Leland-St. John, 5 time Pushcart Prize nominee, is a Native American poet, concert performer, lyricist, artist, and film maker. She is the Editor-in-Chief of the poetry e-zine Quill and Parchment.com. Sharmagne spends time between her home in the Hollywood Hills, in California and her fly fishing lodge on the Stillaguamish River in the Pacific Northtwest.  She is the founder of fogdog poetry in Arlington, WA and tours the United States, Canada, and England, as a performance poet.

 

She is widely anthologised and her poetry and short stories appear as well in many  on-line literary journals.  She has published 4 books of poetry  Unsung Songs (2003),  Silver Tears and Time (2005), Contingencies (2008),  La Kalima (2010), and co-authored a book on film production design. Designing Movies: Portrait of a Hollywood Artist (Greenwood/Praeger 2006). Sharmagne is co-editor of Cradle Songs: An Anthology of Poems on Motherhood (2012).

 

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EL NORTE

 

El Norte.

A prayer upon her brown lips.

 

El Norte.

A dream growing like

plumeria blossoms from

empty chambers in

her heart.

 

In El Norte

she can make a decent wage.

Her children will not go to bed hungry.

She quits her job at the plantation,

kisses her children’s warm cheeks

as they sleep;

says goodbye to Columbia.

 

The Rio Grande behind her,

she now mops my neighbours’ floors,

scrubs their  toilets

for ten bucks an hour.

 

By the time she pays rent for her room,

buys bus tokens, and junk food

there is little left to send home.

Her children grow up without her.

Abuelita sends black and white photographs.

The little one is still frail and thin.

 

El Norte

The Land of Milk and Honey…

The Promised Land he believes in.

He’ll go on ahead,

send for his children one by one;

then his wife and the baby.

 

Under the sweltering

San Fernando Valley sun

he pushes the market basket

as he picks through

the neighbourhood trash;

for glass and aluminum

to recycle for pennies.

Surely his job teaching 

the village children their ABCs

was better than this.

 

In the marketplace in El Salvador

his wife almost forgets she is married.

The man with the gold tooth

smiles at her as he wraps the fish

in newspaper…

adding an extra piece now and then.

 

She misses her husband,

but has nothing to confess to the priest

as he leans in closer

to hear her sins.

 

 

From Divine Names to Kolodji's Haiku - Summer at Bolton Hall

On July 22, 2012, at Bolton Hall Museum, the first reading from "Meditations on Divine Names" featured poets Joe DeCenzo, Marlene Hitt, Dorothy Skiles and Maja Trochimczyk, the anthology's editor.

The readers of poems also included Angela Lee and Mira Mataric. Poets presented their own work as well as selected poems by others: Czeslaw Milosz, Sharon Chmielarz,  Marian Kaplun Shapiro, John Z. Guzlowski, Rick Lupert, Susan Rogers, Leonard Kress, Odarka Polanskyj Sprocket, and Barry Spacks.

The hosts, Lloyd and Marlene Hitt, reminded the poetic guests that the Bolton Hall Museum is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year and encouraged everyone to attend the festivities.

A photo album from this even is available on Picasa Web Album: Meditations at Bolton Hall.
 

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Deborah P. Kolodji - Featured Poet on August 26, 2012!

The next Village Poets Reading at Bolton Hall Museum will take place on August 26, 2012 at 4:30 p.m.  The featured poet, Deborah P. Kolodji, is well known in the poetry community for her involvement in the haiku movement, not just because of her talent.

Deborah P Kolodji is the moderator of the Southern California Haiku Study Group, which meets each month at the Pacific Asia Museum on the 3rd Saturday of the month.   She is also a member of the Haiku Society of America, the Yuki Teikei Haiku Society, the Haiku Poets of Northern California, and the Science Fiction Poetry Association.   She served as president of the Science Fiction Poetry Association for five years, ending in 2011. 

She has published over 800 poems in journals both on and off the web, including Modern Haiku, Frogpond, bottle rockets, Acorn, Simply Haiku, the Heron's Nest, Star*Line, Strange Horizons, Tales of the Unanticipated, the Magazine of Speculative Poetry, Goblin Fruit, poeticdiversity, and the Mainichi Daily News.  Her short stories have been published in THEMA, Tales of the Talisman, and Everyday Weirdness.  Her essays can be found in Frogpond, Haiku Canada Review, the Horror Writer's Association Newsletter, and Chicken Soup for the Dieter's Soul. 

Since the cover of "Meditations on Divine Names" is a closeup photo of a matilla poppy, a haiku about this flower was selected to represent Debbie's talent:

matilija poppies -
a skillet of fried eggs
on the campstove

For those interested, here's a link to Debbie's reading of three haiku at Catalina Library in Pasadena: Kolodji at Monday Evening Poetry.

Dorothy Skiles, Deborah Kolodji, Maja Trochimczyk

Marlene HItt and Deborah P Kolodji at the reading

Group after the reading

Rick Wilson with Deborah P Kolodji