Village Poets Presents Mary Fitzpatrick & Ella Czajkowska on June 22, 2025

 

Village Poets of Sunland/Tujunga welcomes featured poets Mary Fitzpatrick and Ella Czajkowska on Sunday, June 22, 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 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. 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 Fitzpatrick’s poems have been finalists for the Joy Harjo Poetry Prize and the Slapering Hol Chapbook Award; short-listed for the Fish Publishing Prize; featured in Mississippi Review, Atlanta Review and North American Review as contest finalists; and published in such journals as Agenda (UK), Briar Cliff Review, The Paterson Review, Pratik, Red Canary, Silver Birch Press, Terrain, West Trestle Review, plus ten anthologies. A graduate of UC Santa Cruz with an MFA from UMass Amherst, she is a fourth-generation Angeleno who lives in Pasadena and feels at home in Ireland.

Three Poems by Mary Fitzpatrick

Days of Honey

Looking for light in the pandemic, we note

that the bees have returned. Vivid

in their occupation of the clean box

I’d readied, lured by seven-foot

sage-blossom stalks. I’m reassured

there are enough

to break away and form this hive

behind our garage, just in season

to double our pomegranates, a wealth

at any time and especially now.

It’s been three months. By November when

the pomegranates lose the red fuzz

under their leathery crowns, it will be nine.

Our time’s become timeless — is this

BC or AD?   Carthage    Ephesus    Campania?

Make the weeks count.   Lift

a rack of honeycomb from the hive

—it teems and glistens—

and let gold run all over the days.

Published on-line by Silver Birches, 2022

 Last Heat

Grass trampled to a tan parch;

Trees’ green depth blown to dust…

Road, road, ribbon of unfolding—

 

Known as map, called by name,

Calendar, sundial, memory, clock

Unraveling under the hot

 

Footsteps of the runaway, the footfalls

Of her tracker, panting over the layered

Dead, their tendril limbs—Road,

 

You let them clamber at her ankles,

Catch her cast-off, head-boom rags.

Dust returns; the footsteps fade.

 

       *       *       *       *

Now smell the blowze of summer

Curling skyward slow—no

Breeze, no wind

 

To change the season’s mind. As if

Its squandered end

Could put back seeds

 

Into their pods, rewind

Spent stalks and weeds—the things

Time gives so willingly to ash.

Published in Briar Cliff Review, April 2020 

Summer Beach Farewell

Salt Point, CA

Farewell    sweet seal face

Lizard tail    bladder pod    yarrow    farewell. 

Long heat of afternoon gives way

to winter’s storms and lashing wet. 

Today, I hug round stones’ warmth and gather

mollusks in the low tide’s pools:

black mussels    limpets    abalone

fierce and ridiculous crabs. 

Seal watches, undulate in repose. 

Wrapping kelp ribbons round my crops

I lay them in a bed of coals   glowing

amid stones.  My table is

the fallen log.  My company:

the otters tumbled down

their river’s chute to ocean’s edge

to teach their young to hunt.

Farewell.  The racks for drying

fish are folded.  Baskets bulge

with all the sea can give, with salt.  Tonight

I’ll climb    to shelter among trees.

 I’ll turn my back on sea.   No one

will come for me.   At this last feast

I drink the brine.   I gather

one last bleached bone. 

From the basket on my back it grows

radiant as the lonely moon.   

Published in Miramar, 2019

 

Alchemy of Words is the first English-language poetry book of Ella Czajkowska who previously published a book of poems in Polish. These 70 poems deal with themes of nature, divinity, human emotions, existential contemplation and the complexities of life. Ella Czajkowska is a professional Translator, Transcriptionist, Polish and English-Speaking certified Neuro-Linguistic Programming Practitioner and Neuro-Linguistic Programming Master Practitioner, Certified Personal & Business Life Coach, Graphic Designer, English Second Language Teacher, Poet, and PR Manager. Her love of creative writing was born in high school, where she started writing poetry and short stories. In 2015, Ella started to write poetry in both Polish and English, and from 2017 she writes only in English. Her book of Polish language poetry, entitled “Tam, gdzie umierają marzenia”, was published in Rzeszów by Sowello in 2019. Her English-language poems appeared in the California Quarterly and the Crystal Fire anthology (Moonrise Press, 2022). She was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2022 by the California State Poetry Society for her poem "The Calling”.

Three Poems by Ella 

And Still
 

And still hoping and dreaming still
after years of silence and cold,
of breached walls and fallen will -
a thousand years of pain untold.
Body a vessel to be filled
with moonbeam silver, sunlight kissed.
What never was cannot be killed;
what was never known cannot be missed

Endless Feast

I fear the fear of passing days
That lacking be in hopeful grace
Of softer light and lighter ways,
Bereft of new thoughts sweet embrace,
When long be gone the better words,
When long be gone the heat of youth;
That by the time I cut the cords
I will have known the bitter truth.
For I have sat at highest tables
Of their feasts I have partaken,

Ate the fruits of true and fables,
With grandeur been overtaken;
And saw all there was to be seen,
And heard all there was to be heard,
And learned what was, what could have been
I have been still, I have been stirred;
And I have sung a thousand songs,
And I have thought a thousand thoughts,
And I have done the rights and wrongs,
And I have plowed a thousand plots;
And yet the hunger naught abates
For every bite that I have taken
Bite back it did, more yet inflates;
It has no wish to be forsaken.
Must dreams then end, all slumber cease?
What is this law? Or is this need?
Does nature call for strife, then peace,
Then strife again? A sacred creed?
Unmatched then burns that fervid fire
That none can stop, and none can quell;
In its unmet wroth desire
It shall devour itself as well.

Eat Your Heart Out
 

Eat my heart blacken it and season it;

Split apart my ribcage, the choicest pieces

Lay beyond its protection. Reason it
Not with me, halt calm, whatever peace is
This is all passion, this is all fire.
Eat my words devoured from my lips,
Savored; steal breath from my lungs, sweet desire!
Make me mute with awe, that all sound from me strips.
Have my glances, my blushes, my shyness,
My modesty, timidity, demur,
Whisper of grace, beauty, and fineness;
Unravel, till denial and assent blur.
Consume as one consumes long sought meaning:

With desperation born of ceaseless dreaming
 

 Copyright 2024 by Ella Czajkowska and Moonrise Press

Village Poets Welcomes Lois P. Jones and William O’Daly on Sunday, June 25, 2023

Village Poets of Sunland-Tujunga is pleased to invite poets and friends of poetry to our Monthly Reading held in-person, on Sunday, June 25, 2023 at 4:30 pm. at  Bolton Hall Museum, located at 10110 Commerce Ave, Tujunga, Los Angeles, CA 91042-2313. In June our features will be celebrated poets Lois P. Jones and William O’Daly.

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.

 

 

 

Lois P. Jones was recently awarded the 2023 Alpine Fellowship which this year takes place in Fjällnäs, Sweden. She was a finalist in the annual Mslexia Poetry Competition judged by Helen Mort and will be published in Spring 2023. In 2022 her work was a finalist for both the Best Spiritual Literature Award in Poetry from Orison Books and the Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest. Other honors include a Highly Commended and publication in the 2021 Bridport Poetry Prize Anthology   Jones’ awards include the Bristol Poetry Prize, the Lascaux Poetry Prize for a single poem, the Tiferet Poetry Prize and winning finalist for the Terrain Poetry contest judged by Jane Hirshfield. In collaboration with filmmaker Jutta Pryor and sound designer Peter Verwimp, her poem La Scapigliata won the 2022 Lyra Bristol Poetry Film Competition. Her work appears or is forthcoming in the Academy of American Poets - Poem A Day, Poetry Wales, Mslexia, Plume, Guernica Editions, Terrain, Vallentine Mitchell of London; Verse Daily, Narrative and others. Jones’ first collection, “Night Ladder,” was published by Glass Lyre Press and was a finalist for the Julie Suk Award and the Lascaux Poetry Prize for a poetry collection. Since 2007 Jones has hosted KPFK’s Poets Café, and acted as poetry editor for the Pushcart prize-winning Kyoto Journal. She is a screening judge for Claremont University’s Kingsley-Tufts Awards.

Three Poems by Lois P. Jones

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

 

 Big Sur Redwoods by Full Moon: Shifting Voices, October 2020

            After Joanna Klink’s Sea by Dusk

 

Comes to you from titans and says be shadow,

be silence. Gathers the length of longing

and says                                   crown the sky with impermanence.

 

Comes in the middle of caution,

an October felled into acres

of loss. Drinks the light,          lulling the waves

of disaster that brought you here. 

 

Enters the path at midnight when the deer’s eyes empty

into trembling. Says                 you who know strength, keep standing,

no fires will catch the heartwood

 

where you live. No oceans will drown you

in their history.                       

Dream, the path calling you

beyond evening’s bleed of wood smoke into the clearing.

Be somnambulant,

walk in the certainty there is no blindness,

only what comes between you and this act of knowing.

 

                                                Fall like a nocturne in to the river,

rushing like grain beneath your pillow,

shifting the rhythm of your breath beyond the newly dead.

Tonight is a long hour without minutes,

this blue bead of moonlight on your brow. 

 

Be the spirit girl who stands in clear water

stilling everything – trees, stones, root skin,

invisible creatures who pause as you think of them.

 

Shelter in the mirror of her image,

her cape of grey doves, dense as the moss that surrounds her,

be stunned as the shaft of light on her face. 

Move like a hymn in the hidden worlds,

be here, only here.

 ~Published in Tiferet

 

Frida Travels by Train to Meet Rilke for the First Time

Against all expectations, I, a young and inexperienced girl, was selected out of many applications …to keep house for the poet Rainer Maria Rilke at Muzot. 

            ~ Frida Baumgartner, October, 1921

 The sky is complicated and flawed and we’re up there in it.  Opening its letters. Crossing countries to clean someone’s clouds. Crossing mountains stacked with chanting.  Stacked with secrets.  Strange tongues that want to define us, that refuse to taste us. As in tasting the last honey-dipped slice of apple on this train.  I watch the sun spark rivers without faces. Watch my face disappear in the passenger window.  Disappear like Borges and never return.  He won’t believe I’ve read Borges.  Won’t believe I can attend to his silence. Silence is a letter you never open. A ball of yarn knitting sky in a corner. What we want, we fashion. Fashion the proper weather for our wanting. Wanting what is always made of what we cannot make ourselves. There are his blue eyes in the window. He makes what I want, I will fashion what he needs. I will make a cowbell of wishes. I will not ring it. 

 

*With a line from Lisa Robertson.

 ~Published in Mslexia

  

William O’Daly has translated eight books of the late-career and posthumous poetry of Chilean Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda and most recently Neruda’s first volume, Book of Twilight, a finalist for the 2018 Northern California Book Award in Translation. The author of four chapbooks of poems, he published his first full-length volume of poems, The New Gods, with Beltway Editions in September 2022. In March 2023, the Los Angeles Master Chorale including three poems from The New Gods and one from his chapbook, Waterways, in the world premiere of Reena Esmail’s “Malhaar: A Requiem for Water,” at the Walt Disney Concert Hall. A National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, he received the American Literary Award from the bilingual Korean American journal Miju Poetry and Poetics in September 2021. Currently, he is Lead Writer for the California Water Plan, the state’s strategic plan for sustainably and equitably managing water resources.

 

Three Poems by William O’Daly

 

Love in a Changing Climate

Touching your absent hand, I am like the saint

who wanders with the first yellow leaf,

the ease of what might be mistaken

for our familiar love. It’s never easy

to sustain in the eyes what changes inside,

to feel the fear, the abandonment, and shame.

Listen . . . the wind is scattering our names. We are

the question the stone and the river ask.

 

Had I been with you when you died, I’d know

him who knows how to shepherd the dying home.

Illiterate birds ravel our lives with twelve strings

and we find love that takes the leap with us,

stays to clean up the birth of the cosmos,

the benevolent trees that burn like us.

~from The New Gods (Beltway Editions, 2022)

 

The Eastern Sea

Like you, I have sought

the fate of the wave,

the burnt mast, the water birds

gliding near as a prayer. And so

as the eastern sea passes

its ring of opal light to the sky,

I promise I will pass the ring

of the sea to my daughter.

 

Always, the mermaid speaks of love.

The beggar cries that his sandals

were stolen by Jesus. My daughter

asks me to hold those fragile rings,

to hold the sea that breaks with gravity’s secret

and washes over our cold bare feet 

until she has a song to sing to it.

 ~from The New Gods, (Beltway Editions, 2022)

 

Heron Dances Over the World

Even you’re not watching

as you spread your black tattered wings

and step among the colors of the physical world—

spindly legs conjure the symbol for infinity

in red earth, in fresh blue snow and white mist.

 

Endangered islands bloom, the wetland fills

with mountain shadow. In a parallel universe

your reflection moves to its inner calling,

to folded granite, music of the waterfall.

 

You live as hidden origami, with creases

and abandon, intricate patterns that resist

the receding shore. You circle, an equation

neither eyes nor lips can touch—motion that can’t be solved

or written on the tongue. You do not stop to preen

among the battered dunes.

 

Your cry wrings iron from irony,

recalls the silent bells, laments the love

I’ve forgotten. You breathe closer to the swaying aspen

than to the orphaned moon and the tide’s pull.

In this dance you create, like a beetle,

your own being.

 ~from The New Gods (Beltway Editions, 2022)

 PLEASE NOTE OUR "ALMOST" MONTHLY READINGS CONTINUE IN 2023:

25 June (4th Sunday) Lois P. Jones & William O’Daly 

27 August (4th Sunday) Beverly M. Collins & A. Jay Adler 

24 September (4th Sunday) Marlene Hitt & RG Cantalupo

22 Oct (4th Sunday) Ambika Talwar & Susan Suntree 

No dates Nov/Dec due to holidays