Village Poets of Sunland-Tujunga is pleased to invite poets and
friends of poetry to our monthly reading held in person, on the 4th Sunday, Jan 28, 2024 at 4:30 pm. at Bolton Hall Museum, located at 10110
Commerce Ave, Tujunga, Los Angeles, CA 91042-2313. In January our features will be Judith Terzi & Karen Greenbaum-Maya.
Two segments of open mic will be available and refreshments will be served. Suggested donation $5 per person for the cost of refreshments and to donate to the Little Landers Society that manages the Bolton Hall Museum, a Los Angeles Historical Landmark built in 1913.
Judith Terzi is the author of Museum of Rearranged Objects (Kelsay), as well as of six chapbooks, including Casbah and If You Spot Your Brother Floating By (Kattywompus) and Ghazal for a Chambermaid (Finishing Line). Now, Somehow (Finishing Line) is her latest chapbook, a collection of poems about confronting a pandemic, cancer, and other health-related urgencies. Her poems have been included in literary journals and anthologies such as the Atlanta Review, The Examined Life Journal, Lunch Ticket, The Main Street Rag, Solstice Literary Magazine where she was a finalist for the Stephen Dunn Poetry Prize, and Times They Were A-Changing: Women Remember the '60s & '70s. BBC/Radio 3 featured her poem "Ode to Malala Yousafzai" in an episode of Words and Music. She holds an M.A. in French language and literature and taught French for many years at Polytechnic School in Pasadena as well as English at California State University, Los Angeles, and in Algiers, Algeria.
Four Poems by Judith Terzi
Dancing Like They Did
-after viewing the Oscar-nominated short subject documentary Walk Run Cha Cha (Directed by Laura Nix, 2019)
She wears a handmade dress. Sky blue chiffon.
Her high heels sparkle. Rhinestoned ankle straps.
Dancing now at sixty like she did in Vietnam.
She slides into her husband's arms. A fluent bond.
He lifts her up––they twirl, her legs akimbo, no holding
back. She wears a handmade dress. Sky blue chiffon.
They practice moves they've learned at the dance salon.
Her husband looks sharp. Shirt and pants all black.
Dancing now at sixty like they did in Vietnam.
Six years of separation before her papers were drawn.
Before she joined him in California, started from scratch.
She wears a handmade dress. Sky blue chiffon.
It's Lunar New Year's Eve. Celebrations are on.
The couple's at home when the Ballroom's attacked,
dancing at sixty like they did in Vietnam.
Friends, partners are shot. Eleven dancers gone.
Cha-cha-cha. Mambo. Run. Fear that memories
unlatch. She wears a handmade dress. Sky blue chiffon.
Dancing now at sixty like they did in Vietnam.
-Appeared in Schuylkill
Valley Journal
Fountain
-after "The Automat" (Edward Hopper, 1927)
"Kind regards," he wrote. The letter arrived
yesterday. "Kind regards!" We'd made plans:
Paris, marriage. This coat his gift from last year's
great December sale at Wanamaker's, near
the automat where we met. Horn & Hardhart––
its sparkling floors, table tops of marble
he loved. He'd hand bills to the nickel thrower,
rubber tips on every single one of her fingers.
He'd put nickels into the food window slots.
Oh, he knew my favorites: meat loaf or Salisbury
steak, creamed beets, lemon custard pie. Two years
of bliss now gone with "kind regards." How we'd
linger over H&H drip-brewed coffee that flows
from the mouth of a dolphin. Like a fountain in Rome.
-Appeared in MacQueen's Quinterly
Like I'm waiting for kismet. Maktoub.
Waiting for a number, a letter––cryptic
for stage, grade. How many nodes
did she twist away? How many, how
many... Tell me to focus on healing.
Friends bring guavas, mini pumpkins,
t-shirts, pens, soup. The house
is a garden: five white orchids, purple
tulips, yellow roses, irises. Red
bromeliad clinging to bark, shape
of a seahorse, air plants cresting on two
heads. Rearrangement happening
in cachepots. Rearrangement of a colon,
color of geranium in a Casbah courtyard.
Animal on hooks in back rooms
of butcher shops where my grandfathers
blessed meat. How did she swing my
transverse meat around to greet my
small intestine, my distal ileum?
I wanted to catch the now-missing
slice as it slipped through her slick
incision above my navel. To feel
the surgeon's finesse navigate inside me,
caress my organs, then choke the cecum,
the appendix to death. How will the new
partners jibe? How will they groove
with no past in such diminished time?
No memory of all the little madeleines
and Sunday's flow of hours. Slippery
fingertips straining to hold onto a waltz.
-Appeared in Solstice Literary Magazine (finalist
for Stephen Dunn Poetry Prize) -Appears in author's Now, Somehow
Russet
for Jaime
He warms his hands to textured skin of cup,
a first embrace of morning. Rustic cup.
He threw it, swirled it into a jumbo cup
of porcelain, he glazed his earthy cup
a rugged russet shade, endowed the cup
with sturdy, curvy arm. Not round, his cup,
but oval-shaped––a spacious coffee cup.
His lips regale the thick-lipped rim of cup––
the only lips the rim permits to cup.
If ever he falls ill, his artsy cup
will take a break. A manufactured cup
of glass for chamomile or mint, no cup
to match the chemistry of homespun cup––
high fire flesh he'll ache to stroke, to cup.
-appears in author's Now, Somehow
Karen Greenbaum-Maya is a retired clinical psychologist, former German major and restaurant reviewer, and two-time Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee. Her work has appeared in journals including Comstock Poetry Review, B O D Y, Rappahannock Poetry Review, CHEST, and Spillway. Her collections include three chapbooks, Burrowing Song, Eggs Satori, and, Kafka’s Cat (Kattywompus Press), and, The Book of Knots and their Untying (Kelsay Books). A collection of poems about her late husband’s illness and death from lung cancer in 2018, The Beautiful Leaves, was published in August 2023 by Bamboo Dart Press, and is also available through Amazon. She co-curates Fourth Saturdays, a poetry series in Claremont, California, as well as Garden of Verses, an annual day-long reading of nature poems in Claremont’s California Botanic Garden.
Three Poems by Karen Greenbaum-Maya
Sonnenizio from a Pawnee song*
Over the line where the sky meets the earth: Pleiades!
Overwhelmed and drunk on stars, we return to find
a brown bear skulking over by the garbage cans,
drawn over by sun-ripened smells
swirling low after the day is over.
Pick-up is at least a week overdue.
Our headlights sweep over him,
not a big one, scarcely over 600 pounds,
and he looks us over. The set of his solid head,
paws on the hips, he’s cool, nothing overheated
about him: What do you mean, ‘move over’?
Why shouldn’t he pick over our garbage,
our leftovers, nothing we wanted any more?
We inch over to the cabin, burst through the door.
*In their Hako ceremony, the people of the Pawnee American Indian Nation sing a prayer of hope to the Pleiades during their November rising. Kathleen L. Nichols, a university professor in Kansas, provides the English lyrics:
Look
as they rise, rise
Over the line where sky meets the earth, Pleiades!
Lo! They, ascending, come to guide us,
Leading us safely, keeping us one;
Pleiades, teach us to be, like you, united.
I Help My Husband Sleep
Your head rolls onto my shoulder, crushes
my hair so it rasps in my ear.
I smell your silver hair,
Einstein-wild from hospital sweat,
waxy under my hand.
Me almost under you, offering myself
as a better bed, compressing
the single-use egg-crate mattress.
I’m here to let you let down.
Stop fighting your eyelids’ pull.
Burrow your heavy head into my breast.
I’ll hold on while you take up your dreams
like a tired dog who feels the grass
under his paws, twitching in his sleep
at the flicker of abundant rabbits.
I lie braced in the narrow bed
that keeps me from cradling you enough.
Soup Pot
--for Wisława Szymborska
Her sister’s soup, steaming in a poem,
simmers here in the pot.
Wisława takes soup seriously,
considers how much salt for the barley,
how fine, how coarse to slice cabbage,
how long caraway seeds may cook before turning bitter.
This soup took two, or maybe twenty lifetimes.
Being famished helped.
In that War, she worked for the railroads
rather than be sent out to build them,
to starve slowly in forced labor
while her voice suffocated from silence.
She learned when to hold back,
how much is too much.
Deep in the soup, she stirs in step with Aubigné.
Wisława reaches for the bison grass,
finds it without having to look,
translates into French without thinking
as she sniffs at the jar. (More salt?)
Each boxcar held neighbors who died.
Now the fresh mushrooms. Now, the dried.
A soup should be as full of mushrooms
as Polish of consonants.
At night, the flame’s slow breath
condenses on the window, freezes to ice,
glass on glass, a clear inch thick.
These days, Wisława prefers oxtail over ham hock,
balances out turnips with carrots.
She knows what all went into the pot,
but not what will emerge.
Yeti will show up for a bowl, praise
each grain of barley, every shred of cabbage.
Karen Greenbaum-Maya Publication credits:
