Lois P. Jones & Susan Rogers Headline Reading on April 26th, 2026

 

Spring will be in full swing when we welcome our feature poets, Lois P. Jones & Susan Rogers to Village Poets at Bolton Hall on Sunday, April 26th at 4:30 p.m.  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.

 

                                                 Three Poems from Lois P. Jones

Lois P. Jones is an award-winning poet and editor whose work spans poetry film, radio, and print. Since 2007, she has served as the poetry editor for the Kyoto Journal. For nearly 20 years, she hosted Poets Café on KPFK Pacifica Radio, featuring conversations with celebrated voices like Neil deGrasse Tyson and Julian Sands. Her debut collection, Night Ladder, was listed for several awards.Some honors include the Bristol Poetry Prize and the 2023 Alpine Poetry Fellowship. Her work has appeared in many journals including Academy of American Poets – Poem A Day, Poetry Wales, Plume, Image, RHINO and others. Lois continues to bridge text, sound, and image across global disciplines. In April 2026, she launched The Title Drop, a new podcast exploring the role of the title poem within a literary collection. She believes poetry exists to render the ineffable and find beauty in life’s stark contrasts, providing a spiritual and sensual guide to being in the world.

HOUSEKEEPING: Frida’s Future Kiss

After the palm reader told her no man would ever claim her, she asked to be claimed by the white horse she dreamt of each evening. It always began with a nuzzle, a warm breath, like a kiss made of clouds that hovered and finally released its rain. As if life only existed in the closed rooms of her eyes. And there, the scent of crushed grapes and the white shadow of a horse becoming human. Not a satyr but a transmogrification like a moon-impersonating streetlamp. A tenderness that lived inside the small of her waist, his hand, this gentleness, and the tongues that mixed their silence. She does not need her knees, fingers, thighs, saliva – only this window where she looks into the mind’s vanishing frame. A flutter like a valve opens and he turns to her. Their love like silk sheets toppling over the wicker basket.

 Published in Plume

 In Search of Rilke’s Ghost, She Visits her Last Life at Muzot

 It was all dirt in 1921, when the summer let out its last hot breath on the walk from Sierre and up the path leaving you covered in dust. If I squint, you might be there. Something moves but it’s a tall poplar wind has jostled into aliveness. See the white fence mostly grey and peeling all along the edge of the house and down to where I stand near the vineyard. The yellowed leaves after the last harvest. The roof-cast shadow over your balcony. How could I expect you would open the door. You, a one-hundred-year-old ghost, who are just as alive in your absence the same way you would like words to be — like the dark and light moving between your roses, their dried leaves curling in a rusted pot. If I listen, you might be there. This thrush sings so ecstatically, right now. When outside, the world is a stone immovable, lonely. I’m trying to shake the sun loose from your old watering can.

 Finalist published in Mslexia.

 Years After Rilke’s Death the Housekeeper is Asked How She Lived at Château de Muzot

            After Agha Shahid Ali

 What served for a young woman’s days? A life in silence?

This house was built with its own vow, a wife in silence.

 This quiet—a forest to shelter bellflower, elk, rose.

For years, we slept, we dreamt—the stars’ afterlife in silence.

 How did the Tower hold us–with ghosts? storm? and stone?

Do the gods have the will for a life in silence?

 Of our pear tree—only taste remains– summer left, a guest.

Memories rise—a kite, I hold its twine in silence.

 She who makes the bed and bathes the floor. She rubs the spot

of moonlight, irons the night in silence.

 do you feel the power/of your breath … to fill the space?

December severed all sound, forged a knife in silence.

 After candles were lit in the chapel—the wine drunk—

we watched the Rhone’s rush to stillness, stillness iced in silence.

What moved slowly in winter—the needles—the lace I knit.

A glass of rum to halt my cough, a bride price of silence.

 Whoever says I am less of a woman because I gave

my life to a man, has never held a life in silence.

 How the wind welcomed his death—the land its snow;

a body at the top of a hill, disguised as silence.

 All night is indigo, the rain too. It says Frida—

loss is incarnadine—death a valentine in silence.

Published in Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature’

Copyright  © 2026 Lois P. Jones All Rights Reserved

Susan Rogers considers poetry a vehicle for positive energy. She is a practitioner of Sukyo Mahikari, a spiritual practice promoting positivity. Her poetry is included in numerous publications including The Best Poems of San Diego, Kyoto Journal, Tiferet and Saint Julian’s Press. She was nominated for a Pushcart in 2013 and 2017 and was one of four international judges for the 8th Rabindranath Tagore Award. She was interviewed for KPFK’s Poets Café by Lois P. Jones. https://www.loispjones.com/susan-rogers. In 2023 she participated in the conference Sustainability and Spirituality in Assisi, Italy where she read her poem during the invocation and presented on the healing power of poetry.

Three Poems from Susan Rogers

Invocation for a Season of Connection

 Let all voices join, all kingdoms come,

all grievances be resolved.

All reach across the aisle, the pew,

the bench, crevices in stone

within temple and mosque,

the fissures in the floor of the cathedral.

Let the words we find wrong,

even blasphemous, be considered.

Our ideas welcomed by those we love

and do not love nor understand.

Let us skip the litany of loss, leap

chasms between lives so that

for just one season we can be

as trees, connected underground

by roots, celebrated equally

no matter the species, no matter

the number or nature of our leaves.

 published in the San Diego Poetry Annual, 2024

Territory

Two fallen hummingbirds

fire red and iridescent green

side by side on the sidewalk.

 

It seemed a small blasphemy

to admire the exquisite sheen

of their wings.

 

A river of pure color lit

by morning sun. What a waste

of beauty, I thought.

 

What could have been so important

to fight and fall?  Territory?

Some misdirected desire?

 

How my day lay caught between

red and green. How the best

of us becomes mired in such scenes.

 

How could the order of our universe allow

such a squandering of light, of life?

We carry each other’s wings.

 published in the Altadena Poetry Review:Anthology 2024

Interstellar

Father, I reach for you from inside a black hole. Do you remember

the bookcase scenes from Interstellar? How Cooper uses fallen books

to traverse time and communicate with Murphy? He was caught, as I am, between worlds,

yet he sent his daughter messages in code from the stillness

 of a tesseract. I speak to the spinning cloud of your dream where you're

fast asleep in a narrow bed. Your assisted living apartment, shrouded.

I repeat, I will come back.

 Even when I'm beside you, I try to bridge the gap. Sometimes in silence,

that wall of strangeness between us. I reach across, asking if you want water,

 place a bird of paradise by your bed, but you are angry, uncertain why I am

there. From your own country you try to push your side of things through.

 Love is the singularity within our black hole,

 a pearl, intentionally placed. You are my anomaly. Still, your voice holds gravity

that pulls me in. You plead with me. I can't hear you.

I don't understand.

These times I bring you photos from your bookshelf and ask,

Do you remember? You respond like I'm speaking in binary coordinates.

Last night, I visited the library in Memory Care, where they were showing

Interstellar. I said goodbye to you. I walked again past that room,

 where several books had scattered on the ground.

published in Poetry Goes to the Movies, 2025, edited by Suzanne Lummis 

 Copyright  © 2026 Susan Rogers All Rights Reserved

                                Landscape Photos from Descanso Gardens by Maja Trochimczyk

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Village Poets Welcomes Two Celebrated Poets on February 25, 2024

 

 Village Poets Welcomes Two Celebrated Poets in February

Village Poets of Sunland-Tujunga is delighted to invite poets and friends of poetry to our monthly reading held in person, on the 4th Sunday, Feb 25, 2024 at 4:30 pm. at Bolton Hall Museum, located at 10110 Commerce Ave, Tujunga, Los Angeles, CA 91042-2313

In February we are honored to have internationally celebrated poet, James Ragan, as well widely acknowledged poet, Amy Gerstler for this special reading. Come celebrate the month of love with two amazing writers and join in the open reading or just come to listen.

Two segments of open mic will be available and refreshments will be served. Suggested donation $5 per person for the cost of refreshments and to donate to the Little Landers Society that manages the Bolton Hall Museum, a Los Angeles Historical Landmark built in 1913.

 

Appearing in 36 anthologies and 15 languages, James Ragan is an internationally recognized author of 10 books of poetry, including The Hunger Wall and The Chanter’s Reed, and 3 plays staged in the U.S, Moscow, Beijing, Athens etc. With poems in Poetry, The Nation, World Lit Today etc, he has read at the U.N, Carnegie Hall, for CNN, NPR, PBS, BBC and 7 Heads of State including Vaclav Havel and Mikhail Gorbachev. Honors include 2 Litt.D’s, 2 Fulbright Professorships, an NEA Grant, Emerson Poetry Prize, 9 Pushcart Prize nominations, Swan Foundation Humanitarian Award, a Poetry Society of America citation, finalist for the Walt Whitman Book Award, London’s Troubadour Int. Poetry Prize, etc. He’s the subject of the Arina Films documentary, Flowers and Roots, awarded 17 Int. Film Festival recognitions, and Platinum Prize at Houston’s Int. Film Festival. He directed USC’s Professional Writing Program (25 yrs), served as Poet-in-Residence at Cal Tech (3 yrs) and 26 summers as Dist. Professor of Poetry at Prague’s Charles U. Czech President Vaclav Havel honored him as  “Ambassador of the Arts” at the 1994 World PEN Congress. Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney praises his poems for “sparing no passion in believing they sing,” and Nobel nominee Miroslav Holub lauds his “domination of the art of poetic narration with insight that marks major poets.”

                                                     Poems by James Ragan

 The River in the Tree

 In the hollow where the dark spits up

cat’s teeth in white and alder green,

I hear the wind click down along the willow spars

like crackling leaves in chimney fire,

and know the river in the tree.

 

It is May always and the same willow

sprays its haunt of lilacs down the watercourse.

All month the dozers sweep the hillside up

and toss it down in puddles. It is said

the stream is swamp and old for rooting.

 

In sleep I hear its false voice calling

like the dance of air when the crickets sing.

All night the swish slag pours into my ear,

and sparks of evergreen and potato pokes

drip in mud pouched like melting butter.

 

Above the iris path I hear the quiet passing

of the swing rope slicked by finger oil.

With bony child’s feet I served the sky

and leaped for the greater good

to the solid slag of the city side.

 

I know the past needs leaving like the river

my body makes to root all grounding leaves.

Today my neighbor tilts his finger to the air,

and praising axe handles, fells the windless willow.

It lies old for rotting, the good for nothing.

from Womb-Weary, Carol Publ. 1990, Finalist, Walt Whitman Center Book Award 1987

The Pacific

Its mind has from the little bark of thinking

created the whale, a water tree, a floating

paradox. The ocean seems to believe there is no shore

worthy of thought and beyond the thought no memory.

 

It has seen the otter’s sand diminished, the sea mews tarred,

the mountain space above the beach a swale of fire

burled out of poppies or the greens of weed and kelp

as if persistence by a larger will were reigning,

as if from whales a long thick oak were being carved.

 

From any distance where the rower steers the waves

away from ground, a reflection enters, breaks apart,

and on the stirruped shafts of light, a whale dives up

to branch the shores of memory extinguished in our hearts.

 from The Hunger Wall Grove Press, 1995

Motherskin

              to a Slovak mother

Born of wheat root and summer rusk,

born of rain, sheened gold as hair swirled

in the soft comb you rake and truss,

you delight in a mirror or photograph

or the touch of any son.  When you bale

 

bread one by one with prayer hands,

the heart of hair on every child’s arm lingers.

You blush at a wedding dance

and love counting fingers

 

when I play the boy and promise to die young.

All day in the shadow wood of the green martyr,

you kneel, your babushka slung

high across your shoulders. You can never die.

The earth would cease to grow and only know water.

 

The shale beneath the house has claimed your hair

possessively, the way spring water fawns moss

for breath or the wash of fresh air,

the way childskin seeks a bed to smoothly lie across.

Published in the Los Angeles Times  on Mother’s Day, May 14, 1989., From Womb-Weary, Carol Publ. 1990

If For Each of Us

a rope could swing us

long and light across a widening trough

of all that fails us in our lives,

I would want to land upon the Isle of Echo,

lush with repetition, green with being

original in birth and twice the twin

a wave might dance along the skerry.

I would want a canyon tall for hawks to carry

long the deep tattoo of voices on the air.

I would want an ear to hear

what words to read again to memory,

what verse to carol, thoughts to root

before the sparrow’s flight the mind has taken

comes to rest on truth. I would want

to hear a vowel repeat in consonance

with alliteration’s frothy throat.

And should the landing fail its footing,

I would want to know what inspiration

in shorter flight one syllable might repeat

as in the swash the flat-stone makes

to skip across the light in water

or the voice a wind gives to birch and linden.

I would want the distance to all understanding

to narrow just enough to fail at failure.

I would want a melody of chances

to learn to love again what first I dreamed,

free as wonder, soft as touch,

and of all things simple

to care again for them as much.

from Too Long a Solitude, Oklahoma University Press, 2009.  Finalist, Oklahoma Book Award 2010)  originally appeared in Poetry Magazine Pushcart Poetry Prize Nomination, 2005

 © 2024 James Ragan

    

Amy Gerstler's most recent book of poems is Index of Women (Penguin Random House, 2021). Her work has appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies, including the New Yorker and Paris Review. She is currently collaborating with composer, actor, and arranger Steve Gunderson on a musical. Her previous books of poems include Scattered at Sea, Dearest Creature, Ghost Girl, Medicine, Crown of Weeds, Nerve Storm, and Bitter Angel. In 2019, she received a Foundation for Contemporary Arts CD Wright Grant. In 2018, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her book Dearest Creature (Penguin, 2009) was named a New York Times Notable Book, and was short listed for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry. Her book of poems Bitter Angel won a National Book Critics Circle Award. In addition to poetry she also writes fiction, nonfiction, plays, journalism and art criticism.

 Poems by Amy Gerstler

Ode to the Pillow

Must a pillow, that cushiony head-welcomer, always concede to our cheeks? Can it nurse no higher ambition than to impersonate a marshmallow? Might a pillow never stand up for itself? Does it possess no intrinsic personality? Must it shun sharpness, remain nothing but slump and mush, never displaying its anger or will? The sad fact seems to be that for all its virtues the pillow lacks backbone. Smooth and cool to the touch, clad in a fresh pillow slip, my pillow for tonight exhales a whiff of the steam iron's disciplinary rigor, but transformed, its cotton sweetening the iron's hot metal breath---the breath of a prison matron--into something more like the breath of a meadow. A shock absorber, a pillow is more forgiving than a priest (much is spilled onto it: think dream leakage.) And a pillow functions well as a confessional. The sick and the helpless may be buoyed up, as if by a life raft, in clinging to their pillow, or they may be smothered with one into a final goodnight. Like the uncomplaining potato, the pillow is willing to take shape according to people's needs, enduring mashing after mashing. Pillows have no sense of their own splendor. Employed as ineffectual weapon a pillow can of course burst and snow feathers, drizzle fluff or rain buckwheat husks...and herein lies the pillow's mysterious connection to weather. It's believed pillows subsist on a diet of fog and cloud, though no one has ever seen them eat. 

Published in “DMQ Review”

Siren

I have a fish’s tail, so I’m not qualified to love you.
But I do. Pale as an August sky, pale as flour milled
a thousand times, pale as the icebergs I have never seen,
and twice as numb–my skin is such a contrast to the rough
rocks I lie on, that from far away it looks like I’m a baby
riding a dinosaur. The turn of centuries or the turn
of a page means the same to me, little or nothing.
I have teeth in places you’d never suspect. Come. Kiss me
and die soon. I slap my tail in the shallows–which is to say
I appreciate nature. You see my sisters and me perched
on rocks and tiny island here and there for miles:
untangling our hair with our fingers, eating seaweed.

Published in Bitter Angel (North Point Press & Carnegie Mellon Press)

The Cure

Doing fantastic, thanks for asking! I just chugged

a glass of dinosaur urine and feel new-baptized!

If you're ever lucky enough get your hands

on a quart of this stuff don't be squeamish.

It makes penicillin seem like skim milk!

No virus can slay you with dino piss in your system.

Last night I participated in the 8 pm scream-out

again. For a quarter of an hour the two halves

of my neighborhood yell as loud as they can

across our little canyon to prove to ourselves

as well as the folks we can't see anymore

that we're still kicking after nine months

of pandemic lockdown. Now my throat feels

strip-mined, but I'm glad cause my sense

of connection got fed--not a whole meal,

just a handful of crumbs--but hey, that's way

better than nothing. After yesterday evening's

hoot and holler session, a dude on the far side

of the ravine lugged a pair of ginormous speakers

up to his roof and blasted excerpts from two

of Dr. King's famous sermons, plus some lines

from a Cesar Chavez speech I could understand

only half of because alas my Spanish is not what I

might wish. Then he proceeded to DJ a weirdass

menu of songs, so loud the balcony was quaking

under my feet, ranging from "Stayin' Alive" by

the squeaky-voiced Bee Gees (who do sound like

insects) to Aretha Franklin belting "Chain of Fools"

(a comment on the hopefully outgoing government,

was my guess). Joan Baez sang "We Shall Overcome"

in her reedy soprano. Then Aretha again with

"Amazing Grace." When realized I could actually

see the ant-sized guy responsible for curating

this spoken-word-and-song broadcast from across

the arroyo, shirtless on his roof with a quartet

of friends, I admit I cried a little bit. Then I went

back inside and downed another mug of sauropod

pee. It's a lovely amber color, with notes of gingko,

horsetail and fern. That drink sure has kept me

going during this dark time. 

Published in “Court Green”

 © 2024 Amy Gerstler