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.
Copyright © Published in Aroho
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.
Copyright © Published in Aroho
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?
Copyright © Published in Moria
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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.
Dreams of the Search
i.
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.
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