Village Poets Presents Lory Bedikian & Mary E. Torregrossa on October 27, 2024

 

 

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

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

 

 

 

Village Poets Welcomes Judy Kronenfeld & Lee Rossi Sunday Sept 22, 4:30 p.m., at Bolton Hall in Tujunga

 

Village Poets is proud to present two excellent poets in September. Lee Rossi, formerly of Los Angeles, will be returning to the Southland from Northern California to read from his new book, Say Anything.
And Judy Kronenfeld's new chapbook, Oh Memory, You Unlocked Cabinet of Amazements! was just released by Bamboo Dart Press in June. We are looking forward to hearing them both.

In addition to the features, 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.

Judy Kronenfeld’s  six full-length books of poetry include If Only There Were Stations of the Air (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2024), Groaning and Singing (FutureCycle, 2022), Bird Flying through the Banquet (FutureCycle, 2022), Shimmer (WordTech, 2012), and Light Lowering in Diminished Sevenths, 2nd edition (Antrim House, 2012)—winner of the 2007 Litchfield Review Poetry Book Prize. Her third chapbook, Oh Memory, You Unlocked Cabinet of Amazements! was just released by Bamboo Dart Press in June. Her poems have appeared in such journals as Cider Press Review, Cimarron Review, DMQ Review, Gyroscope Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, New Ohio Review, Offcourse, One (Jacar Press), One Art, Rattle, Sheila-Na-Gig, Slant, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Verdad, and Your Daily Poem. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in Hippocampus and Kaleidoscope, and frequently in Under the Sun, among other journals. Her more occasional short fiction has been published in the Madison Review, Literary Mama, the Loch Raven Review, and elsewhere. Apartness: A Memoir in Essays and Poems will be released by Inlandia Books in 2025. A Stanford Ph.D. in English (1971), Judy published a controversial book on Shakespeare and Shakespeare criticism, King Lear and the Naked Truth (Duke U.P., 1998) and a dozen articles on English Renaissance and other literatures, before turning her attention completely to creative work. She taught English Literature at UC Riverside, UC Irvine and Purdue University, and is now Lecturer Emerita, Creative Writing Department, UC Riverside, having retired after more than two decades teaching there. Judy is a native New Yorker, raised in the Bronx, but has lived most of her life in her beloved California—in Riverside—with her anthropologist husband. Their two children and four grandchildren live (way too!) far away in Maryland.

Three Poems by Judy Kronenfeld

City Benches in the Sun

The way people sometimes sit

on benches in cities: as if the April air

and breeze and sun were not available

elsewhere, or for long, so they must tilt

their faces upward, must even close

their eyes, and not talk or observe

the scene, just let the breeze

and warmth flow over them...

 

Is it simply a matter of choosing to collect

one’s self for a while, after visiting

a sick mother in the hospital,

or going to the employment agency,

or the unemployment office, or

taking the kids to their father’s

for his week, or several of these

in one rushed day?

 

                                                   But no,

even the dowagers of leisure

in their eight-room apartments feel compelled

to dress themselves on a glorious spring

morning, to descend in the elevator,

to nod and smile as the doorman,

opening the glass and shiny brass door,

greets them by name, and to walk over

to join the stream of humanity—

 

a small branch of which is sitting now

on a well-used bench near a tree

just leafing out in palest green

on the median of this crowded

two-way street—their chins lifted, sun

glowing red-orange on the inside

of their lids—basking as if on the Riviera.

Published in MacQueen’s Quinterly 23 (April 2024)

Mind-too-full-ness

With every fragment of my one precious,
dwindling life, I am trying to focus
on these strawberries I bought for breakfast
as I wash them—enormous berries,
that look as if they’ve been given hormones,
like steers and heifers, and a little too crisp
on my knife, I notice, as I quarter them
into a bowl—unlike the miniscule
and profoundly sweet wild ones I would like
to find in a hilltop patch in some idyllic future—
berries that would stain my hands as I stuff them,
three after two in my mouth, whose juices
would dribble down my chin.

I drag my attention, kicking, back to the present,
marvel at the multitude of strawberry
seeds on each piece—tiny slightly quizzical
eyebrows all over the red flesh—which lead me
away to nature’s contingency plans,
her overcompensation for bad odds:
the leathery pomegranate pouch packed
with hundreds of arils bejeweled in glistening,
delicious ruby pulp; frogs that produce thousand-egg
clouds; fish that release millions at one go.
And oh! the hundred little turtle hatchlings
I watched on a video last week. Cheered
by onlookers, they clambered out of the nest,
then flippered laboriously over mountains
and valleys of sand to the sea, where maybe
one in a thousand (on a good day) or one
in ten thousand (on a bad) won’t be scooped up
by a barracuda or plucked by a gull.

I’m trying to tug my eyes back
to the cheerful strawberries in their white bowl,
trying to haul myself with gratitude back
to the warmth of my kitchen, back to my right arm—
almost healed from a fracture months ago—
actually lifting the bowl, back to your brightening
eyes as I set the berries on our breakfast table
next to the buttered toast.

But, love, I can’t not see the ruined world—
how it empties of deliciousness, brightness
and warmth, how it fills with the sounds
of annihilation by enormous bombs, dulls
to the uniform grey of destroyed cities,
how irrevocably it numbs the starving and stunned,
sitting on the mutilated ground hunched
over their fires—trying to bake a little
ashen bread with the last of the flour.

Published in One Art (Feb 2024)

Deep Travel

I was a child in a five-boroughed Garden of Eden/city—
the given, new, and crumbling, shining, grimy
world. And I heard talk of “sixth boroughs,”
places with the thickness of familiarity, places I imagined
I could pass into with no resistance—the way ghosts passed
through walls in 50s TV fantasies—and be at home.
And now so many once-strange latitudes have addresses in my mind,
which light up warmly when I hear or read their names: 7^th, 8^th, 9^th,
10^th , 11^th “boroughs,” so different from the 1^st through 6^th,
yet naturalized in the longue durée of cumulative or extended visits.

Sometimes there’s a kind of placeless favorite weather in my dreams,
jacket-cool as June in Norway, or autumn in the little park not far
from our Bronx apartment—light glancing, breeze-tossed, in the trees—
and I don’t know where I am. Or there’s a rhythmic brilliance
of magenta, flame, and lavender, that could be the joyous spring decor
in lamppost flowerpots in almost any town in France, or my long-gone
aunt’s hanging baskets down-dripping with impatiens in her summer
garden in Roslyn, Long Island. Sometimes I savor a sense
of restful busyness in whatever task I’m carrying out—
like the calm of Fanti fishermen mending their nets
on the Ghanaian coast, their smooth backs gleaming in the sun.
Sometimes my loneliness feels summed by a solitary red
farmhouse casting its shadow on the snow—on a spit of land
jutting into a fjord, or on the great plains of North Dakota.

Some part of me yet hopes, when I’m poled across
that last black frothing river, I will disembark
with no resistance, and be welcome
in the final borough, the 12^th, perhaps.

Published in Cider Press Review 23, Issue 5 (Dec. 2021)

 

Lee Rossi describes himself as a “vertically integrated poetry conglomerate.” He writes poems and reviews, and has interviewed such poets as Robert Pinsky, Carolyn Forché, Edward Hirsch, D. Nurkse, and many others. In addition to several Pushcart nominations, he is the winner of the Jack Grapes Poetry Prize and the Steve Kowit Prize. He has published five volumes of poetry, most recently  Say Anything, from Plain View Press.  Individual poems have appeared in The Southwest Review, Rattle, Spillway, The Chiron Review, The Southern Review  and many other venues. His reviews and interviews can be found at Pedestal.org, Rain Taxi, Rhino Reviews, and Poetry Flash. He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and a Contributing Editor to Poetry Flash.

 Say Anything, his latest book, an Editor’s Choice at Publishers Weekly, wins this praise: “Readers seeking a spiritual, sophisticated collection will find depth, lightness, and surprising illumination in Rossi’s poetry, ‘whose only motive is joy.’”

 Of Wheelchair Samurai, an earlier volume, the memoirist Frances Lefkowitz writes: “As Rossi says in one of these poems, ‘surfaces betray.’ And so he delves, finding the truth that lies beneath. The poetry in this compelling collection exposes the dark and the light of human relationships.”

 And of Darwin’s Garden, his fourth collection, Marsha de la O, author of Creature and Antidote for Night and , tells us that: “Much as Darwin walked his ‘thinking path’ in his garden in Kent, Lee Rossi teases out the hidden structures of experience in this remarkable work on childhood, bearing the freight of ancestors, masculine codes, sex, religion, and the not-so-tender mercies of nuns, and parents.”

 Four Poems by Lee Rossi

The Jogger

He ripped the jack from his iPod

as if cancelling his subscription to God.

It was her song, the one with her face

on its flag, the flag she speared

into the permafrost of his heart

claiming him forever.

She was a surgeon

who makes beautiful incisions

but forgets to close the hole.

The evening was soft,

moisture trickling

down the faces of the leaves.

He could leave the park

and return to the uncertain

weather of his apartment.

Or he could stand there beside

the path, cord dangling

like a patient in ICU who

cuts his own life support.

 Published in Midnight Chem#2

 I Ken Him

You were the legal eagle,

but who was the carrion?

You were the gun-dealer, the gun-toter.

the loader of shotgun shells,

dispenser of pills —

payment for services rendered,

legal opinions for illegal drugs,

books cooked on request.

You were the meter of discipline,

the palm of punishment, the back hand

of pain, the how-dare-you-smile,

was-that-a-smirk at family dinner,

the go-to-your-room, the drop-your-shorts,

drop-your-underpants, the palm of retribution,

you were the shaker and maker of cocktails,

oligarch of olives, herald of hangovers,

you were the overhearer of every phone call,

the interrogator of every attempt to leave

(a walk to the store, a breath of fresh air),

you knew every inch of the house

(and why not, there were so few inches)

and what belonged in each and every place,

you were policeman, prosecutor and judge,

maximum sentence magistrate, appeals court,

parole board, trustee and warden.

there was no escaping you,

not even when I married,

not even when you died.

Published in San Diego Poetry Annual 2023

The Air

Every time we breathe we take in—

hum along with me now:

oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide,

ozone (ozone!) and lots of other stuff

we call particulate matter,

all the parts and particles of a

million particular things—

we breathe but don’t even notice

it, floating there catching a stray

photon and beaming it in your face—

flakes of skin, bits of hair,

elephant dander, hyena fuzz,

grains of sand, their diamond glitter

all the way from Africa and Arabia,

dried llama and yak “dirt,”

all of it a swirl in the green

and blue. And what about water vapor,

those tiny mirrors that mirror

the tiny oceans of our bodies,

their islands and rivers,

their teeming lifeforms,

upstream and down. Take a

whiff, a deep, deep breath—

the world, the whole spinning world!

Published in Caesura 2023

 Cuckoo

“There’s always more happening than we can bear!” Tomas Transtrōmer

First it’s one pill daily for hypertension.

Then hearing aids so I don’t have to listen to my kids complain that I don’t listen.

Then a pill to keep my tent pole erect.

Then a mold to keep my flat right foot from yelling.

Then more pills, 6 then 8, when my arthritis becomes unbearable,

my immune system attacking my joints.

Then my dog starts losing his hair and can’t climb stairs.

Then covid damages my heart—another pill with more to come.

Meanwhile the ruby-throated hummingbird who thinks this yard belongs to him—

he tells me he doesn’t need legal documents like deeds and wills—

buzzes anyone he doesn’t recognize or like.

Sometimes he likes me, sometimes he hovers over my shoulder

like a black helicopter about to unleash its load of rockets.

We’re like an old married couple, except we aren’t.

We’re predator and predator, David and Goliath,

Jack and the Giant. The quick and the dying..

Published in Lips Spring 2023