Our next Village Poets reading at Bolton Hall Museum will be on Sunday, August 23 at 4:30 p.m when we will feature two Poet Laureates of Ventura, Mary Kay Rummel & Mary Ann McFadden. Hosted by Joe DeCenzo & Alice Pero, 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.
Mary Kay Rummel
THREE POEMS BY MARY KAY RUMMEL
Last Night in St. Paul
Fireflies still light the dark streets
of Cathedral Hill
where my father grew up
in a large white boarding house,
one hundred fifteen years ago,
two world wars ahead.
What’s left of a gold quarter moon
hangs like a comma over the old city
balanced just above the cathedral spire.
It rises, we say. It’s dead but it wanes and fills.
Around the moon blurred and yellow air,
gold blessings shower
on the cathedral, on banks and offices.
But even in this calm light, living can be so hard.
We have weapons.
We have fathers who die.
How miraculous it is to be alive at all —
loving if only for a moment.
I once thought my early St. Paul days
would stay the same to the end —
a life of faith and moonlight.
But it no longer works to live
just one life at a time. Nor one death.
Even now, I start over.
carving love into bread.
Sometimes I hear a great wind.
Gyroscope Review, Spring 2026
My Cartographic History
I never learned to read a map.
I had no need of one on West Seventh
or on my restricted convent walks.
You were young and impatient
and I just wanted to lie
near any campion spun from stone.
Did it matter after all?
How we missed the Jungfrau,
how we made love on the wrong mountain.
We found another vertical meadow,
made love among alpine forget-me-nots,
near an abandoned shepherd’s hut.
We were surrounded by a parade of peaks
one of them the Jungfrau we never knew.
Old maps were never enough--
it’s time to let them go.
These days I try to name each rock, bloom, bird
while you long for any mountain.
In this weathering of spirit, our lives,
snowbound and crowned with stone,
we are mapping our own Jungfrau,
a cartography of the heart.
Salt 6 & Little River of Amazements
Illuminator Dreams:
An eleventh century nun in northern Germany, scribe and painter
She copies the gospel
in a tower among oak branches.
She dreams of light
falling across the page,
shining through the leaves,
drawing her in and she writes
a story beneath the story.
Painting her dream light, she learns
underneath is more,
too much light to see
in the margins of the world.
With a hard tipped brush,
she dips into ultramarine
made from crushed lapis lazuli,
paints on calfskin, rests
with the tiny brush in her mouth,
wets it, readying herself
to paint Mary’s blue gown.
Her painting like the scribble
of rain on the lake’s wide page,
breaking off light, breaking off
when the light moves on.
She follows deeper, weary
inside the womb of rock, of rain.
She dreams of lapis stones carried
from Afghanistan by merchants
along that great silk road.
Stones worth more than gold.
Once she sat in sunlight
near a waterfall and once
she sang near the southern sea.
This is her story now,
and the light is hers forever.
In a thousand years, another woman will find
flecks of lapis in the nun’s stone teeth
nested like tiny blue robin eggs.
Nimrod; Nocturnes: Beneath Flesh and Stone & Little River of Amazements
Mary Ann McFadden
Mary Ann McFadden is the current Ventura County Poet Laureate. Her first book, Eye of the Blackbird, won the Four Way Books Intro Prize in Poetry, 1995. Her second book, Devil, Dear, was published by Alice James Books in 2014. She has been published in a range of journals, including Southern Poetry Review, Kayak, The American Voice, Nimrod, Bloom, Green Mountains Review, and Psychology Tomorrow. Her poems have been anthologized and twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize. In 2010 she was awarded a MacDowell Fellowship and spent six glorious weeks among the musicians and painters and writers there. Her first great teacher was Carolyn Kizer, who tutored her on Stanley Kunitz and Theodore Roethke, especially. She received her MFA from New York University where her teachers were Galway Kinnell, Sharon Olds, and Yehuda Amichai, among others.In 2005 she had several poems set to music by Gerald Busby which were performed at Carnegie Hall.
THREE POEMS BY MARY ANN MCFADDEN
No Condors in Sight
We launch our bodies over the cliffs, our answering wings circle us up
three thousand feet to glide along the ancient flyways.
Over the spreading citrus, dry riverbeds of the Santa Clara and the Sespe,
over the small pink house,
a dog barks, a woman looks up.
Out of the sun's disk, black spots, black motionless wings sail west
forty miles, or southwest to the islands.
The dog barks, the woman raves, her children stretch into their lives.
We veer into a spiral laden with dark birds whose cries swell the air
as we descend to plunge into the rot-soft carcass
again and again
until the heart bursts and the maw lies open. Bloat and release, gorge
and surcease: there is enough.
Soaring the full, unruly winds of the Pacific, over the fields of bean
and sugar beet, startled towns, the pink house
where the father withers, over the laps of foothills, fossil shells
pushing out of the clay,
the new range
sheer by the old, wings whistling, fifty miles an hour we fly.
Published in Devil Dear (Alice James Books)
The Way Corn Grows
In the courtyard, a leafless oak strung with colored lights.
Such a wee protest, a cry against the dark
that engulfs us as the whole earth tilts.
I have a pile of soft hats, gloves, scarves,
and a rack of coats arranged in order of warmth. I have my hours
marshaled and portioned into tasks,
cupboards where the moths thrive and where the mice
shop among jars of cinnamon and rice.
I have my trusted, companionable ghosts
with books under their arms, and with lamps to follow.
When the way is precarious,
when neither self-praise nor self-loathing tell me the truth,
I have only the world itself to lie down in.
The way corn grows, like giving birth.
The way vast migrations of geese sweep clean the eye that sees them.
Published in Devil Dear (Alice James Books)
Among Others
Already a breeze has come down from the north
where farmers harvest beans and wheat--
the rich ones in air-conditioned combines, the poor ones
who pick by hand. When this north wind freshens them,
they stop and shout to each other.
Next months' storms will bring geese and grebes overhead,
and the winds after that will bring ice and snow.
So many choices we have to make, so many ways to go wrong.
Around us is suffering we don't know how to change
and in our cities, even in our warm coats we shiver.
When a gulf of cold air pours a thousand miles across the earth
and ruffles us, we are glad we live among others.
Though even the smallest act of kindness can turn out the wrong way--
a dollar placed in the outstretched hand
can come to the price of a meal or a drug, the words we mean to say
can be misunderstood, and love, that glimpse of good, can sour.
Though every righteous place we construct together can slip
and destroy, we can hide our heads in one another.
What we need is somewhere out ahead of us.
What we want is just to see one thing clear.
Published in Rosa Mundi (Gunpowder Press)
Our next reading will be on Sept 27 featuring Beth Ruscio & Karen Kevorkian
