Village Poets of Sunland/Tujunga welcomes featured poets Mary Fitzpatrick and Ella Czajkowska on Sunday, June 22, 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.
Mary Fitzpatrick’s poems have been finalists for the Joy Harjo Poetry Prize and the Slapering Hol Chapbook Award; short-listed for the Fish Publishing Prize; featured in Mississippi Review, Atlanta Review and North American Review as contest finalists; and published in such journals as Agenda (UK), Briar Cliff Review, The Paterson Review, Pratik, Red Canary, Silver Birch Press, Terrain, West Trestle Review, plus ten anthologies. A graduate of UC Santa Cruz with an MFA from UMass Amherst, she is a fourth-generation Angeleno who lives in Pasadena and feels at home in Ireland.
Three Poems by Mary Fitzpatrick
Looking for light in the pandemic, we note
that the bees have returned. Vivid
in their occupation of the clean box
I’d readied, lured by seven-foot
sage-blossom stalks. I’m reassured
there are enough
to break away and form this hive
behind our garage, just in season
to double our pomegranates, a wealth
at any time and especially now.
It’s been three months. By November when
the pomegranates lose the red fuzz
under their leathery crowns, it will be nine.
Our time’s become timeless — is this
BC or AD? Carthage Ephesus Campania?
Make the weeks count. Lift
a rack of honeycomb from the hive
—it teems and glistens—
and let gold run all over the days.
Published on-line by Silver Birches, 2022
Last Heat
Grass trampled to a tan parch;
Trees’ green depth blown to dust…
Road, road, ribbon of unfolding—
Known as map, called by name,
Calendar, sundial, memory, clock
Unraveling under the hot
Footsteps of the runaway, the footfalls
Of her tracker, panting over the layered
Dead, their tendril limbs—Road,
You let them clamber at her ankles,
Catch her cast-off, head-boom rags.
Dust returns; the footsteps fade.
* * * *
Now smell the blowze of summer
Curling skyward slow—no
Breeze, no wind
To change the season’s mind. As if
Its squandered end
Could put back seeds
Into their pods, rewind
Spent stalks and weeds—the things
Time gives so willingly to ash.
Published in Briar Cliff Review, April 2020
Summer Beach Farewell
Salt Point, CA
Farewell sweet seal face
Lizard tail bladder pod yarrow farewell.
Long heat of afternoon gives way
to winter’s storms and lashing wet.
Today, I hug round stones’ warmth and gather
mollusks in the low tide’s pools:
black mussels limpets abalone
fierce and ridiculous crabs.
Seal watches, undulate in repose.
Wrapping kelp ribbons round my crops
I lay them in a bed of coals glowing
amid stones. My table is
the fallen log. My company:
the otters tumbled down
their river’s chute to ocean’s edge
to teach their young to hunt.
Farewell. The racks for drying
fish are folded. Baskets bulge
with all the sea can give, with salt. Tonight
I’ll climb to shelter among trees.
I’ll turn my back on sea. No one
will come for me. At this last feast
I drink the brine. I gather
one last bleached bone.
From the basket on my back it grows
radiant as the lonely moon.
Published in Miramar, 2019
Alchemy of Words is the first English-language poetry book of Ella Czajkowska who previously published a book of poems in Polish. These 70 poems deal with themes of nature, divinity, human emotions, existential contemplation and the complexities of life. Ella Czajkowska is a professional Translator, Transcriptionist, Polish and English-Speaking certified Neuro-Linguistic Programming Practitioner and Neuro-Linguistic Programming Master Practitioner, Certified Personal & Business Life Coach, Graphic Designer, English Second Language Teacher, Poet, and PR Manager. Her love of creative writing was born in high school, where she started writing poetry and short stories. In 2015, Ella started to write poetry in both Polish and English, and from 2017 she writes only in English. Her book of Polish language poetry, entitled “Tam, gdzie umierają marzenia”, was published in Rzeszów by Sowello in 2019. Her English-language poems appeared in the California Quarterly and the Crystal Fire anthology (Moonrise Press, 2022). She was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2022 by the California State Poetry Society for her poem "The Calling”.
Three Poems by Ella
And Still
And
still hoping and dreaming still
after years of silence and cold,
of breached walls and fallen will -
a thousand years of pain untold.
Body a vessel to be filled
with moonbeam silver, sunlight kissed.
What never was cannot be killed;
what was never known cannot be missed
Endless Feast
I
fear the fear of passing days
That lacking be in hopeful grace
Of softer light and lighter ways,
Bereft of new thoughts sweet embrace,
When long be gone the better words,
When long be gone the heat of youth;
That by the time I cut the cords
I will have known the bitter truth.
For I have sat at highest tables
Of their feasts I have partaken,
Ate
the fruits of true and fables,
With grandeur been overtaken;
And saw all there was to be seen,
And heard all there was to be heard,
And learned what was, what could have been
I have been still, I have been stirred;
And I have sung a thousand songs,
And I have thought a thousand thoughts,
And I have done the rights and wrongs,
And I have plowed a thousand plots;
And yet the hunger naught abates
For every bite that I have taken
Bite back it did, more yet inflates;
It has no wish to be forsaken.
Must dreams then end, all slumber cease?
What is this law? Or is this need?
Does nature call for strife, then peace,
Then strife again? A sacred creed?
Unmatched then burns that fervid fire
That none can stop, and none can quell;
In its unmet wroth desire
It shall devour itself as well.
Eat Your Heart Out
Eat my heart blacken it and season it;
Split apart my ribcage, the choicest pieces
Lay beyond its protection. Reason it
Not with me, halt calm, whatever peace is
This is all passion, this is all fire.
Eat my words devoured from my lips,
Savored; steal breath from my lungs, sweet desire!
Make me mute with awe, that all sound from me strips.
Have my glances, my blushes, my shyness,
My modesty, timidity, demur,
Whisper of grace, beauty, and fineness;
Unravel, till denial and assent blur.
Consume as one consumes long sought meaning:
With
desperation born of ceaseless dreaming
Copyright 2024 by Ella Czajkowska and Moonrise Press
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