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.
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)
