Village Poets will bring two well-known Los Angeles poets to the podium for an exciting and inspiring event on Sunday, October 27 at 4:30 pm. In addition two segments of open mic will be available and refreshments will be served. Bring your best poems for the open and enjoy 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.
Lory Bedikian
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Lory Bedikian’s second book Jagadakeer: Apology to the Body won the 2023 Prairie Schooner/Raz-Shumaker Book Prize in Poetry forthcoming September 2024 from the University of Nebraska Press and her first collection The Book of Lamenting won the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. She was recently chosen for the Poets & Writers “Get the Word Out” Poetry Cohort 2024. Several of Bedikian’s poems received the First Prize Award in the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry as part of the 2022 Nimrod Literary Awards. Her work is published in Tin House, Gulf Coast, The Los Angeles Review, BOULEVARD, The Adroit Journal, Orion, wildness, and was featured on Pádraig Ó Tuama’s Poetry Unbound podcast. Her poem “The Mechanic,” is included in the anthology Border Lines: Poems of Migration, KNOPF, 2020. Bedikian’s manuscript-in-progress received a 2021 grant from the Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. Her work also appears in Massachusetts Review’s “Revisiting WOMAN: An Issue, 50 Years Later.” Bedikian earned an MFA from the University of Oregon. She teaches poetry workshops in Los Angeles and elsewhere.
Technique
Jagadakeer in Armenian
literally means forehead-letter
or perhaps the letters
the forehead illuminates.
My father would correct me,
the writing on the forehead.
To be the master of what’s
coming, supernatural or not.
I hear my father say
the word providence,
speak of decrees of nature,
this is where his voice becomes
bass and tenor at once,
glorious vibrato for variation,
he declares that to embrace
the mysteries of the universe
you must be able to gaze
at hill and hummingbird
simultaneously. Panoramic.
Neptune and nest. Father,
at birth the word illness
must have been written
above my brows. Could it be
that the wrinkles now
are cross-outs? Where you
are now, do you see my rage,
sentences, printed or peerless
the test results strewn about?
Father, like my health,
could you cause reversal even if for a moment,
to stand at the front door
scent of coffee and pear,
eyes as amethyst, magnifying glass,
storm, brilliant igneous father,
wasted genius, brokenhearted
hidden man, come back,
pontificate. I’d like to show
you how things vanished.
I’ve written, unheard of, words.
Father, Baba, why do I try
to rebuild your story?
Can the body be rebuilt
if the story can do the same?
\***
Published in gulfcoastmag.org/online/36.2-winter/spring-2024
Needle Biopsy
We watch what we think is hesitance
as its long legs enter the stream’s edge
after a few moments we call forever,
and even then, the movement
deliberate, slow, what fear might look like.
Someone close by guesses crane,
someone else jokes albatross,
while it continues its measured pantomime.
We wait as if we understand, our eyes
on the blue-gray body, its plumage
a motionless splendor high above
the soon-to-be-caught pathetic prey.
Amazed at how it has adapted to this life:
creek bed at its disposal, nearby lake
dotted by open mouths of camellias.
Days before seeing this great blue heron,
I, too, entered a procedure, cautious,
believing the day could continue
unscathed despite protocols, alterations.
To adapt is survival. So I sign paperwork,
fasten ties of an examination gown, pace
words so as not to say too much at once.
As I think this, with no falter of step or target,
the majestic bird strikes the water, its neck
a frog’s tongue, its bill a sharp tool, precise,
so perfect in its hunt, we stand
stunned. The outcome: we witness the heron swallow
dinner, swallow doubt.
Despite the earth’s revolutions, I take home
shallow steps, a self-reliance to ground
myself in a world slightly changed, a bit untarnished,
continue in a realm benign.
***
Published in orionmagazine.org Spring 2023
The Book of Lamenting
begins on edges of highways
where the sun raises its swollen
belly,
grasses outgrow themselves,
vineyards wither their nerves.
The sun cracks the dashboard,
slithers between rows of eucalyptus, juniper,
rolls along the wheels of trucks.
Past crows that caw, pod atop
railroad crossings,
the engine cranks its monotonous pulse, distracts me
from posted signs, the yellow snake that guides me along.
This is where I find reasons to question the living,
my father’s face held
in his hands, his brows etched
in the stained glass of the missions,
my mother’s sacrifice dwelling
in deserted turnpikes, her eyes
gazing from overgrown orchards.
Trees disappear. Dried brush
crumbles
into camel’s fur. In the distance, no horizon,
but tumbleweed large as sheep.
This is where I am when the world has closed its ears,
alongside rusted tractors, abandoned
fruit stands,
roaming for hours, nothing but barbed-wire fences,
nothing but the smells of harvest and gasoline.
The road matters more than the
earth,
more than those on the road, it turns
into a spine, ladder of teeth and bone.
In the passenger seat, my
grandmother’s ghost
holds a palm full of seeds, scatters them
skyward for the crows to eat.
All of it behind us now. She tells me
not to tangle my nerves, not to stop
the creed of the open road—
nothing that runs can stay the same.
***
Published on poets.org Copyright © 2011 Lory Bedikian. This poem originally appeared in The Book of Lamenting (Anhinga Press, 2011). Used with permission of the author.
Mary E. Torregrossa
Mary E. Torregrossa, often noted as a storyteller, is more importantly a story-listener, a practice honed by her job as an ESL teacher in Southern California. Originally from Rhode Island, she blends images and experiences of both coasts into her poetry. Also a collage artist, Mary feels that assembling a collage of images has a natural similarity to assembling a poem. Her first chapbook, My Zocalo Heart, is published by Finishing Line Press. Poems appear in Bearing The Mask: Southwestern Persona Poems, in Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond, in Voices From Leimert Park Redux, and Miju Poetry & Poetics: Korean Poets Society of America. Mary is a winner of the Arroyo Arts Collective Poetry In The Windows and named Newer Poet of Los Angeles XIV by the Los Angeles Poetry Festival. Other publications include The Altadena Poetry Review, the SoCal Haiku Study Group Anthology, and websites for Verse-Virtual, Ekphrastic Review and Dime Show Review.
Night Heron
In flight, they tuck their heads back
against their shoulders.
I can name this bird that forages
the mudflats on tiptoe - evening
opportunist – it clenches crabs
and earthworms and little fish
in its hard black beak.
My feet sink into the soft seabed
at
low tide, clamming, bucket half-filled
with quahogs. The black-crowned
Night Heron lifts into the windy shift
from land to sea at dusk, free to roam,
gray bird against gray sky – it squawks
and with steady wing beats
leaves me mired in the muddy estuary.
***
Published in Miju Poetry and Poetics anthology, Vol. 11, 2019
Korean Poets Society of America
I ask my geology professor…
What is a ridge?
I’d read about them
in Hardy Boy books
but had never seen one
except in old western movies,
a desert dry row of big rocks.
I’m from the east coast
where our mountains
are rolling green hills,
hardly tectonic,
I explain to my classmates
on this, my first field trip
into the brown, boney mountains
that rim the LA Valley Basin.
When he points the next time -
Over there by that crest -
I keep my mouth shut
my eyes open to the scrubby
dusty green pine, the disjointed
dark red Manzanita, granite boulders
and
ancient runneled sandstone.
Inside fractures in the rockface
water freezes and unfreezes making
blocks that look like giants’ teeth.
A plateau. An outcrop. An alluvial fan!
Here’s where the two plates meet
And we all jump back and forth
across the San Andreas Fault,
a narrow jagged three foot wide
ravine, eight hundred miles long
NOT a ravine, he says to me.
I swear he rolls his eyes
as he crunches over
to the other side
to address the students
from
across the rift
This is where the mother stitch comes undone.
***
Published in Arroyo Arts Collective
Department of Cultural Affairs/City of Los Angeles
Détente
This might be my remedy
this amber signature of tea
set here before us in cups
of glass too hot to touch.
The scent of steeping
mint leaves drifts
redolent in my thoughts.
Like an aftershock
of the Sierra Madre,
I rattle silver teaspoons
into saucers, sit
clenching sugar cubes
in my back teeth
like Esther, or Kobra,
or Zahra might have
years ago or yesterday.
The tonic eases its way
into your explanation
infused with details
of the truth. I listen,
waiting for the tea to cool.
***
Published in My Zocalo Heart
Finishing Line Press
Village Poets at Wendell Dayton sculpture park, Sunland, CA 2022