Spring will be in full swing when we welcome our feature poets, Lois P. Jones & Susan Rogers to Village Poets at Bolton Hall on Sunday, April 26th at 4:30 p.m. 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. Light 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.
Lois P. Jones won the Alpine Fellowship, judged by John Burnside. Others honors include the Bristol Poetry Prize, judged by Liz Berry, the Lascaux Poetry Prize, the Tiferet Poetry Prize and winning finalist for the Terrain Poetry contest judged by Jane Hirshfield. She was a finalist in 2023 for the annual Mslexia Poetry Competition judged by Helen Mort as well as the Best Spiritual Literature Award in Poetry from Orison Books and the Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest. Other honors include a Highly Commended and publication in the Bridport Poetry Prize Anthology In collaboration with filmmaker Jutta Pryor and sound designer Peter Verwimp, her poem La Scapigliata won the 2022 Lyra Bristol Poetry Film Competition. Jones’ work appears or is forthcoming in the Academy of American Poets – Poem A Day, Poetry Wales, Mslexia, Plume, Image, Agenda, Guernica Editions, Vallentine Mitchell of London; Verse Daily, RHINO, Tupelo Quarterly, Narrative, Spillway and others. Her first collection, “Night Ladder” was published by Glass Lyre Press and was a finalist for the Julie Suk Award. Jones is poetry editor for the Pushcart and Utne prize-winning Kyoto Journal since 2007 and continues to act as judge, editor or reader for various fellowships, contests, and publication opportunities.
Three Poems from Lois P. Jones
HOUSEKEEPING: Frida’s Future Kiss
After the palm reader told her no man would ever claim her, she asked to be claimed by the white horse she dreamt of each evening. It always began with a nuzzle, a warm breath, like a kiss made of clouds that hovered and finally released its rain. As if life only existed in the closed rooms of her eyes. And there, the scent of crushed grapes and the white shadow of a horse becoming human. Not a satyr but a transmogrification like a moon-impersonating streetlamp. A tenderness that lived inside the small of her waist, his hand, this gentleness, and the tongues that mixed their silence. She does not need her knees, fingers, thighs, saliva – only this window where she looks into the mind’s vanishing frame. A flutter like a valve opens and he turns to her. Their love like silk sheets toppling over the wicker basket.
Published in Plume
In Search of Rilke’s Ghost, She Visits her Last Life at Muzot
It was all dirt in 1921, when the summer let out its last hot breath on the walk from Sierre and up the path leaving you covered in dust. If I squint, you might be there. Something moves but it’s a tall poplar wind has jostled into aliveness. See the white fence mostly grey and peeling all along the edge of the house and down to where I stand near the vineyard. The yellowed leaves after the last harvest. The roof-cast shadow over your balcony. How could I expect you would open the door. You, a one-hundred-year-old ghost, who are just as alive in your absence the same way you would like words to be — like the dark and light moving between your roses, their dried leaves curling in a rusted pot. If I listen, you might be there. This thrush sings so ecstatically, right now. When outside, the world is a stone immovable, lonely. I’m trying to shake the sun loose from your old watering can.
Finalist published in Mslexia.
Years After Rilke’s Death the Housekeeper is Asked How She Lived at Château de Muzot
After Agha Shahid Ali
What served for a young woman’s days? A life in silence?
This house was built with its own vow, a wife in silence.
This quiet—a forest to shelter bellflower, elk, rose.
For years, we slept, we dreamt—the stars’ afterlife in silence.
How did the Tower hold us–with ghosts? storm? and stone?
Do the gods have the will for a life in silence?
Of our pear tree—only taste remains– summer left, a guest.
Memories rise—a kite, I hold its twine in silence.
She who makes the bed and bathes the floor. She rubs the spot
of moonlight, irons the night in silence.
do you feel the power/of your breath … to fill the space?
December severed all sound, forged a knife in silence.
After candles were lit in the chapel—the wine drunk—
we watched the Rhone’s rush to stillness, stillness iced in silence.
What moved slowly in winter—the needles—the lace I knit.
A glass of rum to halt my cough, a bride price of silence.
Whoever says I am less of a woman because I gave
my life to a man, has never held a life in silence.
How the wind welcomed his death—the land its snow;
a body at the top of a hill, disguised as silence.
All night is indigo, the rain too. It says Frida—
loss is incarnadine—death a valentine in silence.
Published in Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature’
Copyright © 2026 Lois P. Jones All Rights Reserved
Susan Rogers considers poetry a vehicle for positive energy. She is a practitioner of Sukyo Mahikari, a spiritual practice promoting positivity. Her poetry is included in numerous publications including The Best Poems of San Diego, Kyoto Journal, Tiferet and Saint Julian’s Press. She was nominated for a Pushcart in 2013 and 2017 and was one of four international judges for the 8th Rabindranath Tagore Award. She was interviewed for KPFK’s Poets Café by Lois P. Jones. https://www.loispjones.com/susan-rogers. In 2023 she participated in the conference Sustainability and Spirituality in Assisi, Italy where she read her poem during the invocation and presented on the healing power of poetry.
Three Poems from Susan Rogers
Invocation for a Season of Connection
Let all voices join, all kingdoms come,
all grievances be resolved.
All reach across the aisle, the pew,
the bench, crevices in stone
within temple and mosque,
the fissures in the floor of the cathedral.
Let the words we find wrong,
even blasphemous, be considered.
Our ideas welcomed by those we love
and do not love nor understand.
Let us skip the litany of loss, leap
chasms between lives so that
for just one season we can be
as trees, connected underground
by roots, celebrated equally
no matter the species, no matter
the number or nature of our leaves.
published in the San Diego Poetry Annual, 2024
Territory
Two fallen hummingbirds
fire red and iridescent green
side by side on the sidewalk.
It seemed a small blasphemy
to admire the exquisite sheen
of their wings.
A river of pure color lit
by morning sun. What a waste
of beauty, I thought.
What could have been so important
to fight and fall? Territory?
Some misdirected desire?
How my day lay caught between
red and green. How the best
of us becomes mired in such scenes.
How could the order of our universe allow
such a squandering of light, of life?
We carry each other’s wings.
published in the Altadena Poetry Review:Anthology 2024
Interstellar
Father, I reach for you from inside a black hole. Do you remember
the bookcase scenes from Interstellar? How Cooper uses fallen books
to traverse time and communicate with Murphy? He was caught, as I am, between worlds,
yet he sent his daughter messages in code from the stillness
of a tesseract. I speak to the spinning cloud of your dream where you're
fast asleep in a narrow bed. Your assisted living apartment, shrouded.
I repeat, I will come back.
Even when I'm beside you, I try to bridge the gap. Sometimes in silence,
that wall of strangeness between us. I reach across, asking if you want water,
place a bird of paradise by your bed, but you are angry, uncertain why I am
there. From your own country you try to push your side of things through.
Love is the singularity within our black hole,
a pearl, intentionally placed. You are my anomaly. Still, your voice holds gravity
that pulls me in. You plead with me. I can't hear you.
I don't understand.
These times I bring you photos from your bookshelf and ask,
Do you remember? You respond like I'm speaking in binary coordinates.
Last night, I visited the library in Memory Care, where they were showing
Interstellar. I said goodbye to you. I walked again past that room,
where several books had scattered on the ground.
published in Poetry Goes to the Movies, 2025, edited by Suzanne Lummis
Copyright © 2026 Susan Rogers All Rights Reserved
Landscape Photos by Maja Trochimczyk
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