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)