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