Village Poets of Sunland & Tujunga

Friday, May 8, 2026

5th Sunday of May Features Beverly Lafontaine & David W. Parsley

Our next Village Poets reading at Bolton Hall Museum will be on Sunday, May 31st at 4:30 p.m when we welcome two excellent Los Angeles poets, Beverly Lafontaine & David W. Parsley. 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 91042. 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

Beverly Lafontaine has enjoyed four productions of her plays in the Los Angeles area and has had her poetry published in various online and print poetry journals and anthologies, including Waves, the anthology published by the AROHO Foundation, MORIA, Poets Reading the News, Blue Satellite, Spillway, the Anthology of the Valley Contemporary Poets, So Luminous the Wildflowers: An Anthology of California Poets, and Beyond the Lyric Moment. As a collaborative artist she has worked with composer Tom Flaherty to create Scenes from Sarajevo, a prize-winning chamber music piece. Additionally, she was commissioned to create six poems that are incorporated into the sculptural work of Walk a Mile in My Shoes, a public art project dedicated to Martin Luther King sponsored by the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs. As a journalist she has written for publications as wide-ranging as Essence Magazine, Soul Magazine and Caesura: the Journal for the San Jose Center for Poetry and Literature.

Three Poems by Beverly Lafontaine

My Skin Is Not Enough to Keep Me Warm

The sky is thick and heavy with clouds.
A neighbor’s dog barks. A yelp from a cartoon.,
Behind closed eyes I see his body shudder with every bark,

A car roars its presence, eager not to be
ignored. Never complete silence.
In this building, something always whirs,

simpers. Walls moan against the weight
they’ve borne for years. Water’s ceaseless
songs flush through pipes. All the sounds

of the day gather together, a congregation.
The refrigerator hums, reminds me,
You’re a body, just a body. A tongue, eyes,

nose, arms, legs. A body chilled by the cold,
warmed by the sun. A body definite in time and
place, destined one day to be a memory

conjured up by three notes on the piano
or a whiff of baking bread, then laid to rest
among seeds of wild grass.

Coming Back

The rosemary thirsts. The brown rice is mealy.

A spider spins a universe between a leg of the piano

and a shadowed corner of the living room.

Get sick, stay in bed and that’s what happens.

You become a ghost in your own life.

Bits of me are floating back like moons to their

mother planet. No one else has this exact memory

of honey on toast or this bitter echo of a child lost.

I water the rosemary, sweep away cobwebs, let light and sound

stitch my wounds, healing across time and space.

My Mother and MLK

It was December 1955, and my mother, always a lady but true to her thoughts, reacted with surprise when America’s newscaster, Gabriel Heatter, spoke the name of the newly-appointed leader of the Montgomery bus boycott. My mother, she of the good manners, the pragmatic mind, the well-laid plan faithfully executed, also valued a starched blouse, thin and impermeable, the silken skirt, fanned from the lap’s throne. Not he, the preacher’s son, 17 years her junior. She remembered too well the little bean-head boy with whom she had to share the car’s rear seat once a month when she was a teenager. He was a jumping jack, a whirligig of comet energy as the car chugged its way through Birmingham to his father’s church, and how she dreaded those Sundays in the back seat. That day in 1955, Heatter’s 15-minute broadcast was loud and clear to the land: Negroes are rising, boycotting the buses of Montgomery, and their leader is young and cunning with a voice so sonorous bells will cease their clanging. His name is Martin Luther King, Jr. “That brat,” my mother muttered through pursed lips, as we all leaned into the radio’s speaker, hope alive.

Did cherry trees bloom
in Montgomery that year?
How long must we wait?

Recently retired from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, USA, David W. Parsley now lives part-time in Pasadena and with his family in southwest Utah on the doorstep of Zion National Park, Grand Canyon, and other places of interest. He is using the newly found free time to write more actively now. His poems have appeared in Poetry LA, London Grip, Amethyst, Ghost City Review, Tiny Seed, Lothlorien, and other journals and anthologies. Among his more recent honors, “Kyoto: A Cycle” was a semi-finalist for the Able Muse Award. He was also an invited poet in the online poetry project, Lament for the Dead. 'His tribute to the Cassini mission to Saturn, "Paean for a Spacecraft," is a finalist for the Charter Oak Award for historical poetry at Flatiron Foothills Press, slated for publication in the annual journal, Footnote, this coming year.

Three Poems by David Parsley

As One from the Snowfields

Route to Navajo Mountain,
skitter of tumbleweed - land
and sky merge

like the face of Black God,

shadowy arms

canted to a common side.

Sounds of the ceremony

seal over distance

threading pop and hiss

of the engine with

stars ascending

paths the yeh-be-chai took,

footfalls mute litany

along the galaxy’s ledges.

Small beneath the long ruin

of peaks

the road finds

the horizon’s shadow and follows.

Beneath those bodies

a man could walk

to the cliffs’ forgetful darkness,

that omnipotent mask.

A car goes by, headlights

soft probes on the highway.

Exhaust spreads

brief invisible fire in its wake.

Killdeer’s voice

starts from sleep at arroyo’s edge

and finds me from far away –

I am here! Here!

Yei-be-chai: a Navajo supernatural (often a yei) represented by a masked dancer in an initiation or curative ceremony.

For a Bird Found Dead on My Doorstep

We found him after lunch just

out of the snow.

My wife touched the still-warm breast,

one limber claw drawn in an infant curl.

Yellow as sun, too exotic for our climate,

he would have come while we were eating,

sent while the season’s first stormfall

and its clouds clung to surrounding hills.

We watch those clouds leave our valley today.

Trees and brambles shake down their snow.

I remind her we don’t always know

how hunger approaches our door.

We look for it as we can, ignorant

of where it comes from, and when.

© Previously published: Autumn Sky Poetry, 1/9/2016;

Autumn Sky Poetry, From the Archives, 1/8/2017.

Dreams of the Search

In this place the trails cross without beginning.

It is where the night fell before it could be found

and questioned. Since, the wilderness has listened

through abandoned nests and dams, frozen streams,

to be apprised of our separated arrivals.

Between us the fire throbs a wounded nebula

fragments swirling up beyond its glow

into the pine musk, that star-dwelt darkness.

Look. The sparks successively flare, vanish.

Prescient agonies I do not choose, they choose me.

ii.

It was when I confirmed the others had gone

the white fox bounded from his hole

to lope in and out of view. Though this too

is an injury I stand as mute as sky.

Snow deepens above a deferred

silence. It is into this silence

the last lights were seen to pass.

I sense hardwood, hemlock, a mixed multitude

limbs touching branch upon branch to edges

of rivers, clearings without habitation. If

there are voices, if there are roads,

may they lead to a single home.

Photos of the Sunland Wash by Maja Trochimczyk

Check the Calendar on thie blog for upcoming features!

Sunday, March 22, 2026

Lois P. Jones & Susan Rogers Headline April 26th Reading

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 91042. 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.

Three Poems from Lois P. Jones

Lois P. Jones is an award-winning poet and editor whose work spans poetry film, radio, and print. Since 2007, she has served as the poetry editor for the Kyoto Journal. For nearly 20 years, she hosted Poets Café on KPFK Pacifica Radio, featuring conversations with celebrated voices like Neil deGrasse Tyson and Julian Sands. Her debut collection, Night Ladder, was listed for several awards.Some honors include the Bristol Poetry Prize and the 2023 Alpine Poetry Fellowship. Her work has appeared in many journals including Academy of American Poets – Poem A Day, Poetry Wales, Plume, Image, RHINO and others. Lois continues to bridge text, sound, and image across global disciplines. In April 2026, she launched The Title Drop, a new podcast exploring the role of the title poem within a literary collection. She believes poetry exists to render the ineffable and find beauty in life’s stark contrasts, providing a spiritual and sensual guide to being in the world.

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’

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

Landscape Photos by Maja Trochimczyk

Tuesday, February 24, 2026

Nancy Murphy & Peter Ludwin on Sunday, March 22, 2026

Photo of Sunland/Tujunga Wash by Maja Trochimczyk (2025)

Village Poets of Sunland/Tujunga will feature, LA poet, Nancy Murphy, and Seattle poet, Peter Ludwin, on the 4th Sunday of March, the 22nd at 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 91042. 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.

Nancy Murphy is a Los Angeles based poet and author of the poetry chapbook, "The Space Carved by the Sharpness of Your Absence" (Gyroscope Press, December 2022). The poems in this book were described by Pulitzer Prize winning writer Robert Olen Butler as "Pitch perfect and brave in their wisdom." She was a winner in the Aurora Poetry contest in Winter 2020. Previous poetry publications include SWWIM, Sheila-Na-Gig, glassworks, The Ekphrastic Review, The Baltimore Review, Anacapa Review, Jackdaw Review, and others. Her reviews of other's poetry books have appeared in Cultural Daily and other publications. A long-time volunteer with WriteGirl LA, Nancy has mentored teens through writing workshops and in the juvenile detention system. More at www.nancymurphywriter.com

Three Poems by Nancy Murphy

Sometimes a Wild Saint

After Tom Hiron, “Sometimes a Wild God”

Sometimes a wild saint will storm in while

you’re at the stove

searing steaks,

tapping smoked paprika

onto sweet potatoes. She’ll start

a fire in the blue room, open the best

Burgundy without asking,

crank up

the Stones. Sometimes a wild saint

is not exactly

drunk, (but not undrunk)

maybe beyond

drunk like I was

in my twenties after work

in bars with married co-workers.

I’m not here to confess, I’ll just say

I have seen how things can break

down, how anything can be

forgiven, how miracles are not

that rare really.

Sometimes a wild saint

is such a martyr, deadly

serious. But I’m

not going to fall

into that deep

well of belief again, the longing

that follows, all that embarrassment

when god doesn’t show up

in time.

Sometimes a wild saint

will remind us that there will be summer

again, that I will be able to go underwater

and feel cool on my entire head

and not even care

if my hair ever

dries.

Published in Gyroscope Review

The 2021 Pantone Color of the Year Was Dual: ULTIMATE GRAY + ILLUMINATING

They said it was a marriage of color.

They said it was a message of strength & hopefulness.

They said it’s good to push two shades close together.

They didn’t say that illumination makes the gray grayer.

They didn’t say shadows make the sun brighter.

They didn’t say eventually all paint peels.

(They didn’t need to put ultimate in front of gray.)

They never asked what was most valuable. They never asked

how much coverage we needed.

I would have said gray dusk is not uplifting.

I would have said sunlight hurts my eyes after tears.

I would have said I lied only when I had to.

To avoid staining my hands, I would have done anything.

I never would have dropped that match so close to him.

Published in Anacapa Review

Anniversary

Irish rain chases us around January, climbs

into our bodies seeking warmth.

Instead of romantic evenings,

we split packs of cough drops, turn

away in the dark; the space between us

thickens with my disappointment, gives me

reason to hold back.

We push forward on this road trip,

Connemara maroon hills bleed

into bright green fields, blue-black

north Atlantic waves. Wildflowers

find footing in forgotten soil.

There is resistance in this land,

survival, a refusal to surrender.

We stop in an ancient village, hold

hands, share a pot of tea. He pours

the milk in, then the tea. He makes mine

first every time. It’s unfair how he does that.

The silence between us softens,

almost like forgiveness.

Published in glassworks

Peter Ludwin is the award-winning author of four books of poetry. His newest collection, An Altar of Tides, focused mainly on his native Northwest, won the 2024 Trail to Table Editors’ Award in Poetry from Trail to Table Press. His previous book, Gone to Gold Mountain, which addressed the little-known massacre of over thirty Chinese gold miners in Hells Canyon in 1887, was nominated for an American Book Award by the Before Columbus Foundation. In addition to receiving a 2007 Literary Fellowship from Artist Trust, he won the 2016 Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Award from The Comstock Review for his poem “Wolf Concerto,” judged by Marge Piercy, and the W.D. Snodgrass Award for Endeavor and Excellence in Poetry from the San Miguel Poetry Week in Mexico. Most recently, his poem “Terezin Concentration Camp, Bohemia” won the California State Poetry Society’s “Place” themed contest for August, 2025. An adventurer who has traveled from the Amazon to Morocco to Tibet, poems from which appear in his second book, Rumors of Fallible Gods, he is particularly focused on history/social justice, physical and spiritual aspects of the natural world and different cultures. He lives in Kent, Washington. Find him at www.peterludwin.com.

Three Poems from Peter Ludwin:

Caretakers

These old barns

lean into the storm like buffalo. ,

Wind between their ribs

taunts the root cellar,

snow scatters

voices in the rafters.

Wooden skeletons

speak of who is not,

who once pitched hay

on the dream floor

when tears stained the fence.

Someone here milked desire

while the cow wandered off,

someone told stories to the snake.

Mildewed, they cling to planks

rotted away by whispers.

There is a time

and a time

and a time…

Touch the broken boards

and those stories blaze up like rosehips

igniting the Chesaw Road,

singe your fingers like frost.

Published in Common Ground Review,(2009) and 2024 An Altar of Tides.(2004)

The Promise

I will lie down

with this old boat

in its grave and be glad,

a mansion for crabs

scuttling over my bones,

the dark silver of fish;

I will speak the praises

of stones worn smooth

as thin soles of pilgrims

and weave a blanket of barnacles

at my loom in the half-open clamshell,

knuckles stippled in green.

The tide, slapping

the worm-eaten hull, will wake me.

Under a rising low quarter moon

I will dance a minuet of kelp

while gulls plunder gray waters.

I will face north,

a prisoner of thunderous trains,

and crawl beneath the curtain

of rain falling from my fingernails.

I will lie down,

this wind my protection,

the razor singing at my throat.

Published in The Paradigm Anthology

Day Hike, Whidbey Island

(for Joy)

On the prairie’s far north side we strike

the bluff trail, wind lush with salt,

with stories pried from kelp.

Or have we always owned their song?

An eagle glides forty feet above,

wings held aloft without a quiver.

Dark as anthracite, it drifts toward terrain

only it can occupy, more stunning

than even the lagoon trapped between beach

and bluff. Paused by a stark,

sun-bleached log I see beyond you

the path it takes, the descent into myth,

a port I long to visit. No, not visit—

recover. Fling my net over a dream

claimed as birthright, a child’s first realm.

Baseball, fairy tales, hazelnut trees atop

a wild ravine—all food to nourish

the living no less than a prodigal rain.

Like this bird’s passive flight: such creatures

open us like shells. What tide must

we invoke to cross the water?

Published in Quiet Diamonds; Finalist Maburh-Fenton Poetry Prize