Nancy Murphy & Peter Ludwin on Sunday, March 22

 

                                                                     
                                                              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 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.

 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

©  2026 Nancy Murphy All Rights Reserved 

 

 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

 © 2026 Peter Ludwin All Rights Reserved

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ron Koertge to Feature at Village Poets Feb 22

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

Village Poets of Sunland/Tujunga is proud to bring renowned poet, Ron Koertge, in a solo feature on the 4th Sunday of February, the 22th, 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. 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.

 

Ron Koertge was appointed Poet Laureate of South Pasadena in June of 2018.  

He attended high school in Collinsville, Illinois, graduated University of Illinois in 1962, University of Arizona in 1965. He taught at the city college in Pasadena for thirty-seven years. His poetry writing workshop at Pasadena City College was one of the department’s most popular classes. An entertaining and dynamic reader, Billy Collins calls him “sly, inventive and deeply good-hearted.”

 

A prolific writer, he published widely in the 60’s and 70’s in such seminal magazines as Kayak, Poetry Now, and The Wormwood Review. He continues to publish today, favoring truly independent magazines like Rattle, Nerve Cowboy, River Styx.  Sumac Press issued The Father Poems in 1973, and that book was followed by many more:  Meat (1973, Mag Press), The Hired Nose (1974, Mag Press), My Summer Vacation ( 1975 Venice Poetry),  Cheap Thrills(Wormwood Review Press, 1976), Men Under Fire (Duck Down Press, 1976) (Red Hill Press, 1976), Sex Object  (Little Caesar Press, 1979) The Jockey Poems  (1980 Maelstrom Press), Diary Cows (Little Ceasar Press, 1981),  Fresh Meat (Kenmore Press, 1981),  Life on the Edge of the Continent:  Selected Poems (University of Arkansas Press, 1982), High School Dirty Poems (Red Wind Press, 1991), Making Love to Roget’s Wife (University of Arkansas Press, 1997), Geography of the Forehead (University of Arkansas Press, 1997), Fever (Red Hen Press, 2006), Indigo (Red Hen Press, 2009), The Ogre’s Wife (Red Hen Press, 2013), Sex Object (Red Hen Press, 2014), Yellow Moving Van, (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018). 

 

Koertge is the recipient of grants from the N.E.A. and the California Arts Council, has poems in two volumes of Best American Poetry (1999 and 2005). He won a Pushcart Prize in 2017. His most recent book from Red Hen Press is Pandora’s Kitchen.. He is also the author of “Negative Space,” short-listed for an Oscar in Animated Short Films (2018). He was included in Volume 380 in the Dictionary Of Literary Biography series: Twenty-First-Century American Poets.

 

Three Poems by Ron Koertge 

 

Ideal Reader

 

I found a book of mine in a summer cottage,

and I wondered who was tired of gazing at the lake

 

or reading mysteries from the rickety bookcase

so turned to poetry one rainy afternoon.

 

I like to think of him when someone in a blue

bikini leans in for a preliminary kiss

 

and he says, “Wait a minute.  Look at this first.”

 

Published in “Glimpse” magazine

               

The Afterlife

 

I’ve been dead for years, so this place suits me.

Sixty thousand channels thanks to cable.

Love the game room and those herbal teas.

Everyone remembers Betty Grable. 

 

Sixty thousand channels thanks to cable.

Sleep’s not a problem, we’re all deceased.

Everyone remembers Betty Grable.

Marilyn Monroe keeps asking for a priest.  

 

Sleep’s not a problem, we’re all deceased

tucked in among a thousand souvenirs.

Marilyn Monroe keeps asking for a priest.

Frank Sinatra hums the music of the spheres.

 

Tucked in among a thousand souvenirs,

there’s room for clippings and my Betamax.

Frank Sinatra hums the music of the spheres.

Every afternoon I wax my Cadillacs.

 

There’s room for clippings and my Betamax.

The past is present like a golden key.

Every afternoon I wax my Cadillacs.

I’ve been dead for years, so this place suits me. 

 

Published in Rattle

 

The Old West

 

Rope at her slender

ankles.

 

Villain in a black 

mustache

 

looming.  RR

tracks

 

throbbing

and hot.

 

Explosions

in the distance.

 

Billy the Kid

and his gang

 

of incorrigible

toddlers. 

 

Published in “3^rd Wednesday”

 

© 2026 Ron Koertge All Rights Reserved

                                                         (Photo by Maja Trochimczyk 2026)

 

  

 

 

Mariano Zaro & Jeanette Clough Begin 2026 Season, Sunday Jan 25

Village Poets of Sunland/Tujunga will start the New Year featuring renowned poets, Mariano Zaro and Jeanette Clough on the 4th Sunday of January, the 25th, 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.

Fire Roulette is Jeanette Clough’s fifth poetry collection. An earlier book, Flourish, was a finalist in the Otis College of Art and Design, and the Eastern Washington University book competitions. Other publications include Island from Red Hen Press and two artist books, Stone and Rx.   Her poetry received awards from the Los Angeles Poetry Festival Fin de Millennium, Ruskin Art Club, and Rainer Maria Rilke International Poetry competitions, a Commendation in Aesthetica Creative Works in England, and Pushcart nominations. Clough edited for Solo, A Journal Poetry; Foreshock, An Anthology of Poems from the Midnight Special; and reviewed for Poetry International.  Among the journals publishing her poems are Atlanta Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Laurel Review, Spillway, Miramar, and Wisconsin Review. A native of Paterson, N.J., she holds an M.A. from the University of Chicago, Division of the Humanities, and was an art librarian at the Getty Research Institute.  She co-directed the Los Angeles Barnes & Noble and Rose Café poetry series, and hosted Poetry at Bell Arts in Ventura.  She was artist-in-residence at Joshua Tree National Park where for many years she taught outdoor desert poetry workshops.

                               Three Poems by Jeanette Clough

Night Dive

 

I am the foreign body wearing neoprene, descending 

into the Caribbean Sea wrapped in forty pounds 

of gear and I anticipate sinking like a rock,

 

but scientific fact and good equipment let me hover 

underwater over the sand, breath balanced in and out, 

body rising then lowering, as if weightless, safely above

 

the banded sea snake with black rings precisely spaced 

along its white body, settled on the floor, docile but deadly.  

I propel myself with artificial fins.  A nocturnal octopus 

 

blends with a rock.  Two sea turtles swing by.  A flotilla 

of barracuda, then another of squid, half-imagined 

in the blurred distance.  Beneath me a sting ray 

 

disguises itself under a thin layer of sand, only eyes

and gills unveiled.  We are a small group, patient 

with each other, willing to wait while a diver lingers, 

 

transfixed, floating inside the sea.  Our oxygen lowers 

and we return, an armada swaying in the night’s current, 

timing ourselves to rise slowly.  I break the surface, remove 

 

my mouthpiece and take in again the night air.  Our bodies, 

snug in their own suits.  We can hear each other breathe.

 

Fire Roulette (Cahuenga Press, 2025)

Ardor

 

Pick a direction left or right  

to the street where oblivious to traffic, ballet boys 

and ballet girls parade down the center line 

 

swaying on bright muscled legs, roughing up their toes, 

brushing the asphalt with lamb’s wool and sequins,  

with lost elastic and satin ribbons, performing their steps 

 

with a sharp hunger that will solve every problem, with

ardor hard as a rose-cut diamond set in platinum, in angles 

that refract and will not, no matter what, be still. 

 

 Wisconsin Review 50.2 (2017), in Fire Roulette (Cahuenga Press, 2025)

Uncommon Bounty 

 The sky has been turning shades of slate 

for several miles with us driving under its lowering 

 

tent.  An abrupt downpour cuts rivulets 

into the hard-tack ground.   We are surprised 

 

rain survives its descent through parched air 

without evaporating, to drop needles on the unflinching 

 

windshield that flicks them aside with wipers and speed. 

The other surprise is this rainbow over salt brush 

 

and stubble, the end of its spectrum arc pacing the car 

as if to grant an indulgence, or simply to mark 

 

a gift of water in the dry place through which we pass.

 

Fire Roulette (Cahuenga Press, 2025)

Mariano Zaro is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently The Weight of Sound (Walton Well Press), Decoding Sparrows (What Books Press) and Padre Tierra (Olifante, Zaragoza, Spain). The English version of Padre Tierra, translated by Blas Falconer, is forthcoming in Artepoética Press (NYC). Zaro’s poems have been included in the anthologies Monster Verse (Penguin Random House), Poetry Goes to the Movies(Beyond Baroque Books), The Coiled Serpent (Tía Chucha Press), We Are Here, Village Poets Anthology (Moonrise Press) and in several magazines in Mexico, Spain and the United States. With the Venice Collective he has published two poetry volumes: Angle of Reflection(Arctos Press) and A Shared Condition (Moon Tide Press). Zaro’s short stories have appeared in Roanoke Review, Portland Review, Pinyon, Baltimore Review and Louisville Review. He is the winner 2018 Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing Short Fiction Prize. Zaro’s translations include Buda en llamas by Tony Barnstone (El Tucán de Virginia, Mexico) and Cómo escribir una canción de amor by Sholeh Wolpé (Olifante, Spain). For more than ten years Zaro conducted a video interview series with noted Los Angeles poets for Poetry LA, a non-profit video production group dedicated to promoting Southern California’s poetry scene. Since 2016 Zaro has collaborated with Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center, first as a member of the Board of Trustees and now as part of the Publication Committee.

 Three poems from Mariano’s new book The Weight of Sound  (Walton Well Press, Los Angeles, 2025). 

 

Vaporetto

 

It’s late and we take the last vaporetto

to go back to the hotel.

 

We will be there in no time at all, I want to say.

But I don’t say anything because

we are not talking much today.

 

After a couple of minutes, we realize

that we have taken the wrong vaporetto,

in the wrong direction, that we are trapped

where we don’t want to be.

 

You remove your small backpack,

drop it on the floor.

I lean my forehead against a windowpane.

The glass is wet, cold.

 

                   Our sense of touch is controlled

                   by a network of nerve endings

                   and touch receptors in the skin

                   known as the somatosensory system.

 

There is no place to sit.

We are next to each other, standing, unstable.

 

                   There are mechanoreceptors for movement,

                   nociceptors for pain,

                   thermoreceptors for temperature,

                   proprioceptors for location and position.

 

I wonder if there are receptors

for the skin to say

how it wants to be touched.

Receptors for repulsion.

Exposure

The summer

brought you back.

 

                   Not the tentative, early summer.

                   The furniture still cold and sleepy.

 

Not the last days of summer,

melancholic, licking the forehead

of autumn.

 

                   The heart of summer.

 

The rooftops offered to the sky

like skinned knees.

 

                   The light— flat, unstoppable.

 

No place to hide.

No other season.

 

                   — Has it been already fifteen years?

       — Exactly fifteen years and three months, since you left.

Some Notes on How to Grow Strawberries

 

He doesn’t know what to do, where to go.

Listen to your inner voice, people tell him.

Find a hobby— painting, gardening.

 

He tries gardening.

 

                   Take one strawberry, scrape at the seeds,

                   place them on a paper towel to dry them out.

 

He keeps seeds in small envelopes

with handwritten labels.

 

                   Find seedling pots (as many as needed).

                   Fill up each pot with soil, pour a little water.

 

Sometimes he mislabels the envelopes.

Seeds look alike, they are so small,

so insignificant, they weigh almost nothing.

 

                   Get your seeds,

                   and let one or two fall into the middle of each pot.

 

Each seed knows the road ahead,

and the road behind.

 

                   Your seeds will germinate and create

                   small visible seedlings in around 2 to 3 weeks.

 

The seeds know what to do.

Even the ones in the wrong envelopes,

even the ones with no labels.