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 1st, 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
~~~~~
