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THE ORCHARDS Poetry journal
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© 2018 The Orchards. All rights reserved. This material may not be
reproduced in any form, published, reprinted, recorded, performed,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the explicit permission of
Kelsay Books. All such actions are strictly prohibited by law.
Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas, Editor in Chief
Karen Kelsay Founding Editor and Graphic Designer
For submissions: [email protected]
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Jennifer Reeser
White Bees .............................................................................................................. 5
Jennifer Reeser
Papago Sunrise ..................................................................................................... 6
Tim Love
At Fifty .................................................................................................................... 7
Chris O’Carroll
Getting High with Emily Dickinson ................................................................... 8
David Danoff
Old Town ................................................................................................................ 9
William Doreski
By the Light of Wormwood ................................................................................ 10
William Doreski
How Limpid Can Pastoral Get? ......................................................................... 11
Leslie Schultz
Watercolor ........................................................................................................... 12
Leslie Schultz
Medusa ................................................................................................................. 13
Susan McLean
What You Need to Know ..................................................................................... 14
Susan McLean
An Old Story ........................................................................................................ 15
Audra Coleman
Fourteen Moons ................................................................................................... 16
Taylor Graham
Making His Rounds ............................................................................................ 17
Taylor Graham
Evergreen ............................................................................................................. 18
Taylor Graham
For an Old Dog ................................................................................................... 19
Taylor Graham
Kept As It Was ...................................................................................................... 20
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Peter Vertacnik
Bedtime Story ...................................................................................................... 21
Terese Coe
Courage of a Poet ............................................................................................... 22
David Landrum
Janus .................................................................................................................... 23
Marc Frazier
Forecast ................................................................................................................ 24
Rose Mary Boehm
Looking Inward.................................................................................................. 25
Edmund Conti
Frostfree ................................................................................................................ 26
Katherine Barrett Swett
Artificial Nightingale ....................................................................................... 27
Katherine Barrett Swett
The Sun Rising .................................................................................................... 28
Sally Cook
A Minor Key ......................................................................................................... 29
Sally Cook
All Are Numbered ............................................................................................... 30
Robert Donohue
The Walt Whitman Home .................................................................................. 31
Phil Huffy
MARION CAMPBELL OF KILBERRY, 1919-2000 ................................................ 32
C. B. Anderson
When We Are Gathered to Our Fathers ............................................................ 33
Ted Charnley
For Lady Macbeth, in the 21st Century ........................................................... 34
Phil Huffy
Along the Way ..................................................................................................... 35
Biographies ............................................................................................................. 36
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Jennifer Reeser
White Bees
(Papago Native American lyric)
Over there, white bees
Emanating to the west.
Yonder, they’ll alight
Toward the distant west,
Glinting, rippling, plain and white.
Thotha momoveld can
Novanye neyopa hodoneko
Miawa kamova
Hodoneko vowi muko
Smamsim thotham yahusnuhuwa
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Jennifer Reeser
Papago Sunrise
(a traditional Native American lyric)
The sun is rising.
Bows lie beside the lion cubs.
Rose sky. That is all.
The moon is setting.
Canes lie beside the cougar cubs,
Wildly. That is all.
Tharai woceracima
Hokithab kakatho yahaiwa wuwucima
Hokithab pur mawithur mamata
Vupukumi thiamo
Maratha yutuna
Hokithab pur vapaku yahaiwa wuwucima
Hokithab kiruo mamatu yahaiwara
Cucuwoi kaiima
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Tim Love
At Fifty
“breaking the sounds of sense with all their irregularity
of accent across the regular beat of the metre” —Frost
Bunched deaths, stretched births—they break across the years,
let loose a backwash of affairs. You’re out
of touch, of shape. Before you’ve caught your breath,
post-coital smokes make way for Facebook checks,
regrets and loves un-synced like wipers front
and back that share brief silences as you
drive off recharged, friends siding with your ex,
sprung rhythm hair-triggered by ageing fears—
your New Year jogging hopes that hit the wall,
the steady tide of loss that launched your fall,
the all-night drug-fuelled sex before it all
at once you don’t know who you are, can’t leave
your bed. Each day a slight improvement till
you proudly hold your cup—your final win,
your stroke of luck. From now you’re on your own.
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Chris O’Carroll
Getting High with Emily Dickinson
We drink, we drank, we shall—be drunk.
Our Tankards glow—like Pearls.
A tipsiest Tosspot she among
The Garden’s—tippling Girls.
“A Liquor never brewed,” she says.
“I’ll have a Sip,” say I.
Then—when she leans against the Sun,
My thirsty Tongue—goes dry.
Debauched by Dew, she calls—herself.
Her nature Poetry
Goes reeling—through a Landscape of
Tripped-out Sobriety.
“Inebriate of Air am I,”
She cautions me—too late
As I inhale—the Essence of
Our visionary—State.
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David Danoff
Old Town
Straining to think of something else to say
the whole way down, and almost start to fight
about the place to transfer. What a day.
Isn’t this it, though? Old Town, cold and bright,
and filled with people out for lunch, as we
emerge and turn down King Street. Coat cinched tight,
I swelter; let it flap loose, it’s blustery.
You look uneasy, too. Should we stop somewhere—
for food? It’s past before we’re certain. Maybe
coffee? A bookstore? Doors standing everywhere,
unopened. Let’s keep going. Let’s go further
on through the crowds, through wind that flings our hair
and sends the sea birds wheeling above pale water.
Closer to me. We’ll watch things move together.
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William Doreski
By the Light of Wormwood
By the light of wormwood, you look
slinky as a vine. Near the moon,
your senses bristling, you famish
those of us you’ve left behind.
Maybe you think I’ve drugged
the vacuum between us, filtering
nonsense from the ether. Maybe
you think the stars in the lake
burn independently of those
you memorized in grammar school
when your teeth fit so perfectly.
The knives of shadows nattering
in your wake should convince you
that glowing wormwood reveals
dimensions you don’t discover
in the paintings of Leonardo
or in blasts of Gillespie’s horn.
You can’t count on performance
or affixed imagery to solve
the batter of moth wings against
the killing jar of absolute dark.
You can only look slinky and lift
your tingling ego closer to points
on the cosmos anyone can map.
I don’t know what you expect to dredge
from the moon’s plain expression,
but it flatters you to mingle
moonlight and wormwood on planes
of your face no one has seen
but me: light and shade merging
in gray tones great photographers
loved before landscapes and nudes
became one entity large enough
to fit into the average pocket,
still writhing, feigning ecstasy.
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William Doreski
How Limpid Can Pastoral Get?
The latest café opens
onto a meadow. Patrons
leave their clothes at their tables
and roll naked in tall grass,
startling bobolinks and larks
and inciting huge flotillas
of milkweed-feeding butterflies.
You laugh at the clumsy torsos
writhing in goldenrod and tansy
like seafood beaching in terror
of sharks. You laugh because
you’d never expose yourself
with such vegetable éclat,
even without the cellphone cameras
sniping at this innocence.
I sit with the meadow at my back
and watch your face as you watch
the shivers of excitement deploy.
A third cup of latte shudders
down my plumbing and settles
in a caffeinated stew of ideas,
some of which apply to you,
some to our friends and neighbors,
some to the naked folks behind me.
Since we live in a temperate zone
nudity fetches a premium glance,
even from blued metal people
like you. Don’t get overly
amused, though. I’ve seen you gleaming
in bath and shower, and have glimpsed
amphibious parts you conceal
from the world. No wonder
you won’t graze with these strangers,
and no wonder your laughter sears
my flesh like sparks of wildfire,
which the latte can barely quench.
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Leslie Schultz
Watercolor
Stone-colored clouds press down. I try
not to mind—unloved, unwell
this morning—caught in the same spell
you unspool with an angler’s eye
to pierce me afresh, reel me in,
deny me blue water, blue sky.
But, today, I see through your lie.
I unhook my heart, and then begin
to pile up lake stones—first wet, then dry—
build a skyward cairn right here, in wild, green rye.
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Leslie Schultz
Medusa
(for Louise Bogan)
There are many ways of being turned to stone,
Not the least of them love, the bait that girls
Bite into again and again. Unknown
And unknowing, they comb their bright curls.
Her curls are green, alive, a coiffure wild,
Insistent. Her ears fill with syllables
Only she can unknot into undefiled
Song—eternal whispers unkillable.
The girls sit in the sun, their ears filled by
Sweetness as faded as crushed grass at dawn.
Heroes look small under the morning sky.
Unseen, a snake glides into the wet lawn.
So spins the world, say girls, combing their tresses—
You pick small loves. Or vast lonelinesses.
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Susan McLean
What You Need to Know
I need a wife who makes a good impression,
yet ever since we married, you ballooned.
Looks count for everything in my profession.
A slimmer spouse would help in my progression
to partner. You should have some ribs removed.
I need a wife who makes a good impression.
Your knobby nose gives you a dull expression.
With surgery, your face could be improved.
Looks count for everything. In my profession,
having a subpar wife is a transgression.
I mustn’t have my taste or class impugned.
I need a wife who makes a good impression
at functions: taller, blonder, in possession
of grace and breeding, stylish and well groomed.
Looks count for everything in my profession.
I’m getting a divorce: that’s not in question.
I always knew our married life was doomed.
I need a wife who makes a good impression.
Looks count for everything in my profession.
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Susan McLean
An Old Story
A Greek brings home his clever foreign wife,
who dotes on him, although she’s had to sever
contact with homeland, family, every tie.
She’s coached him, helped him, even saved his life
(and not just once, but often), which is why
he promised that he’d stay with her forever.
Time passes, though, and he begins to eye
a girl who’s lovely, younger, not so clever,
which, when his sharp wife notes it, leads to strife.
Yet, for the children’s sake, they’ll stay together.
So why, then, does her sash conceal a knife?
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Audra Coleman
Fourteen Moons
Here secret words freeze and fall as snow. Here
footsteps grow heavy. Here all our lies rotate
around us, held in place by small
shepherd moons. Here winter
lasts for sixty years. Here the truth
has become an extraordinary thing.
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Taylor Graham
Making His Rounds
Rev. Charles Caleb Peirce (1825-1903)
Now that I’m gone, they call me
the Apostle of the County, and someone’s
presumed to name a stained-glass window
after me. As if that’s a compliment.
Was I destined to stain God’s light streaming
down to touch us mortals at worship?
Ministering inside a church was just part of it.
I’d walk miles through forest and scrub,
Kelsey to Georgetown, then 11 miles farther
to Cool, visiting folks who couldn’t travel
to an appointed gathering –
as if the way-out-woods and fields
weren’t God’s sanctuary. Along the way
I’d speak with crippled Samuel;
my old law professor might have termed him
“paralyzed,” though his mind and heart
as lively as before. Who shows compassion
to the poor and halt, no matter his creed
or persuasion, works the Lord’s passion.
Then I’d walk another 11 miles to Coloma,
listening to bird psalms above the trail.
Someone asked if God regards the wild doe
as His own. I said, possession
is a question for the lawyer I used to be.
The doe is graced by lily-ears tuned to God’s
world which is His word. God knows
each of His children by heart and spirit,
wind through the pines of this land which is
His temple.
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Taylor Graham
Evergreen
One blackbird on the grass
and one in the old graveyard tree –
decked now in April sunlight as if grief
were not the business of root, branch, and leaf.
A cypress come from Italy,
from isles where the dead mass
on their way from life to life. Long or brief
the journeying of what’s to be
after night’s shadows pass.
On a blackbird’s wing, brass-
flash of feathers. Now there are three
blackbirds – five, twelve – birdsong beyond belief.
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Taylor Graham
For an Old Dog
When he’s gone, I’ll still hike the greenstone down
past a grassy meadow fringed by ghost-pine –
scrubby south-face landscape, its bedrock crown.
At the bridge I’ll see if there’s columbine
with scent of summer like a trace design.
He’d read it to discover what had gone
this way – a stranger passing; doe with fawn –
just as I’d watch his sunstone eyes, his gaze
of distances and breeze, of noon and dawn,
those gems more lasting than our wander-days.
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Taylor Graham
Kept As It Was
museum, the old farmhouse
In the upstairs bridal bedroom,
a glass kerosene lamp (unlit) and
the lacy curtain behind it
become a single brightness with May
streaming in the window,
blinding off the cover of a book
leatherbound, laid aside, never
again opened on a chair whose back
is scrolled and limned
with that same spring light –
luminescence that just won’t be
shut out, or in.
As if morning had bitten off
a corner of the picture, eating away
at shadows of the long-gone past.
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Peter Vertacnik
Bedtime Story
Your story was the first our mother told me
That I can still recall once having heard.
If there were others before yours, they’ve since
Been covered over, like the layers of
Paper on old walls: inaccessible,
Yet present, which is how I think of you—
Not as an angel or a guardian,
As was insisted on then. Even then,
As a child scared by darkness, it seemed wrong
To say you had been taken for a purpose,
However much it helped me sleep. And yet
I can’t help turning back to that staged tale
If for no other purpose than brief comfort,
Surely one reason why our mother kept
On telling it, more for herself than me.
I don’t remember when she stopped, when I
Began to think it to myself each night—
Just as a child who’s learned to read forgets
That day when only-spoken syllables
Transposed themselves beyond the audible.
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Teresa Coe
Courage of a Poet
In little garrets slant and tight
alive with grave pursuings
the poets settle down to write
of each of their misdoings.
How brave they are. To persevere,
how daedal, how outlandish!
In motley on the rude frontier,
with whetted words to brandish.
And whether they eulogize the dead
or satirize Titania,
or exalt their childhood quadruped,
it’s seen as egomania.
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David Landrum
Janus
He is the god of doors and entryways and not a god who only welcomes in the New Year—and the image that displays his back/forward-looking face does not pretend to copy his appearance but to say what is the nature of his deity: the god who rules passing: the night and day, transition, exploration, change, entry into a new room, new year; when we leave behind a city, a familiar site, or when death draws the curtain and we grieve as loss brings darkness, canceling our light. He is the god who stands facing before and after—guardian of every door.
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Marc Frazier
Forecast
Listen, whatever it is you try / to do with your life /
nothing will ever dazzle you / like the dreams of your body
—Mary Oliver
Dreams flare like flamingos into more light.
Somewhere over blue fields is the form my spirit will go to when the dreams of my body have
lived their separate lives.
Each star begins apart from itself.
Each moment is lost.
The sum of us is ponderable.
The dreamer, not the dream, is impossible.
I know your solid hands around me in the blue shadows of this tropical dusk.
I will never set down all that I carry.
But I feel I will when we balance the moon on a hurricane-strewn limb.
I am through considering ways for my body to revolt.
I am through with the debris of love.
With boarding up windows.
Escape routes.
I will swim into surf until it or my body tires.
Choose the strongest words upon which to build my thoughts.
Dispose of the weak loves of my past lives.
Split the atom with my resolve.
Want within reason.
Bear the unbearable into the eye’s calm.
Rest and grow stronger until I have no choice.
I pray for each gull without favor.
Build a sturdy life from what is left.
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Rose Mary Boehm
Looking Inward
What is it about being alone
at night, when sounds
feed your mind
and fill it with scurryings,
axmen and things in black hoods
with nothing inside.
You lock your door three times
despite knowing that the beast
can pass through walls and iron bars.
You don’t look back
over your shoulder
because you know it’s there,
waiting, breathing softly.
The only refuge the bed.
You’re five again, sure
in the knowledge that your
comforter protects you against
all comers. But unlike then
you know this time
that everything
is of your making.
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Edmund Conti
Frostfree
The land was ours before we were the land’s.
It used to be the other way around
But that is something no one understands.
Before we start let’s have a show of hands,
Does anyone regard this as profound?
The land was ours before we were the land’s.
The argument we’re stating here demands
That each of us commits to stand his ground
But that is something no one understands.
The footing’s tricky—watch the shifting sands
As well as arguments that may astound.
The land was ours before we were the land’s.
We seem to be at sea between two strands
To sink or swim and possibly be drowned
But that is something no one understands.
Two final thoughts before this poem disbands
(does anybody want another round?):
The land was ours before we were the land’s.
But that is something no one understands.
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Katherine Barrett Swett
Artificial Nightingale
I think I heard a nightingale inside
the olive grove, but do they sing in the day?
I do not know. I only know he cried
the way the artificial one I played
would cry repeatedly until I wound
the pin too tight and broke the fragile thing,
a nineteenth-century folly someone found,
concocted of some feathers and a spring.
I think it was a nightingale I heard
and not at all mechanical. I found
the imitation one had been absurd,
a faint cartoon of nature’s fuller sound,
but even this just brought me to the brink
of hearing a true nightingale, I think.
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Katherine Barrett Swett
The Sun Rising
“Busy old fool”—John Donne
While all across the town they’re waking up
to curse the clock and make their morning tea,
to rouse the kids or walk the restless pup,
and look back at their bedrooms longingly,
I think the sun’s fantastic, rising up
and pouring in with youthful yellow gleam
and squeezing orange in my reddish cup
and slipping in the curtains as I dream.
Old fools, we’re lying in the bed we made,
for nothing else is calling to us now;
escaping summer’s heat in oaken shade,
a lazy bull and even lazier cow,
we, unlike those young fools, now realize
that one day our sun will, in fact, not rise.
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Sally Cook
A Minor Key
At four I learned each note, fingering position,
The pedaling, the staff and the precision.
She pressed the ivories gently, music flowed;
Dry pods were rattling as a green lamp glowed.
Snow hung upon the air, and, heavy on the soul,
Colored our days with dun. The years unroll
As they did then, and so will always do—
Largo, but sure. A tiny flame burned blue.
As she played on. I yawned, my fingers stiffening,
Thought this a wondrous and imperious thing.
Music among old ornaments, dust-filled,
While sharp cold sliced through window cracks, then spilled.
The signature of time is slow, the beat is sure.
To minor keys we dance, and do inure
Ourselves. We seek the tiny warming fire—
That flame to which we all say we aspire.
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Sally Cook
All Are Numbered
Published in my E-book “Measured By Song” (New Formalist)
Moving along the narrow grassy rows
Under a sherbet sky, time seems to be
The only place where nothing ever grows
Or dies, and grass remains, eternally
Quite clipped and orderly. It truly shows
That someone, somewhere, sometime gave it care.
Each blade of landscape preens itself, and knows
Whatever it may know. And we compare
The picking of the fellow on the stair
Playing what he calls oiling music, slow,
To lengthening of grass. The mower’s snare
Is measured by the song. We’ll come and go,
Yet always will this perfect moment stay;
A timeless mowing tune, an hourless day.
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Robert Donohue
The Walt Whitman Home
My daughter was the reason that I went,
I would do anything to help with school.
I wrote a poem once; I broke no rule
But now I couldn’t tell you what it meant.
This was the place; there’s no need to invent
Some tale to play a tourist for a fool
I doubt that tourists come; truth can be cruel,
It isn’t where vacations should be spent.
I never saw a house more poorly made
Nothing there was level, square or plumb.
I’m not a know-it-all, but I’m not dumb,
For my whole life I’ve worked within the trade
So don’t assume a minute I don’t know it:
He was a lousy carpenter, and poet.
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Robin Helweg-Larsen
MARION CAMPBELL OF KILBERRY, 1919-2000
In winter’s broken skies, in spring’s thin drizzle,
The gardens wall in sun to warm the ground,
Can still be worked: vegetables grow year-round.
Fingers are cold - but hearths will crackle, sizzle.
It’s drear - but through a week’s rain, and two fair
Days’ sun, daffodils flood the world with light.
Otters slide down rocks, lambs jump in delight,
Rooks tumble, jump and slide, in empty air...
You love their flight; but, grounded, here you stand.
The summer dry and hot, sea almost warm,
Unpeopled heather hills, long days, no storm.
And you, embodying castle and land:
Stone walls and floors, trophies and weaponed walls,
Books read, books written, haunting ancestral halls.
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C. B. Anderson
When We Are Gathered to Our Fathers
Words are men’s daughters, but God’s sons are things.
—Samuel Madden, Boulter’s Monument (1745)
What will we be to them, those rested souls
That wrought a lineage through ages past,
When we ourselves debark upon the shoals
Of Avalon? Will they regard the last
Ashore as something less than what it was
Each one of them envisioned in the course
Of forging worthy legacies? It does
Not matter that they are the very source
Of us, as we shall be to those we greet
In ages yet to come, for every life
Engenders others, often incomplete
And mostly unremarked. The world is rife
With possibilities and grand events
That never happen: Risks seem far too great,
Potential disappointments loom immense,
And there is seldom cause to celebrate.
So let us be as fathers to the sons
We’ll never have, and let our daughters be
The reconciliation, chosen ones
Who ease our passage through eternity.
[first published in Poetry Salzburg Review, No. 29, Summer 2016]
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Ted Charnley
For Lady Macbeth, in the 21st Century
We know the dirt you couldn’t clean
with all your scrubbing, all your might;
the things that still are kept unseen.
These shadows trail us, not contrite
but wearing spotless alibis.
They come in darkness, make demands,
then disappear upon first light.
This is the way we wash our hands
of awkward disconnects between
a public face and appetites.
On stage, our poses strut and preen;
tell wordless lies that aren’t white.
The viral buzz of this is quite
enough to launch our trending brands,
and dressed-up dirt is sanitized.
This is the way we wash our hands
of how we play Act Five, first scene,
where avatars deny, deny
(we’ll hide behind a glowing screen),
and rage at every dirty slight
(in person, being more polite);
the anti-social network dance
with OCD knows no respite.
This is the way we wash our hands
of stories cleaner to rewrite
and sleepwalk through our spotless lands,
surrounded by these acolytes.
This is the way we wash our hands.
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Phil Huffy
Along the Way
(Greenway—a linear open space along a natural corridor such as a river, stream, rail trail or canal) Once tamed but now a wilder scene as farms and horses stand their ground, the sight of locks now puddled green where water flowed, but weeds abound. Stern folkies turning back the years may chant and strum a towpath hymn or sing of grimy engineers and railway footprints now laid dim. In spring, while pedaling, southward head a fox I followed as he run; another time I softly tread near rows of corn in morning sun. From here to there no longer sought, from town to town, as yesterday, boats and barges travel naught and ancient trestles steal away.
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Biographies
Jennifer Reeser is the author of five books, a bi-racial writer of Anglo-Celtic and Native
American Indian ancestry. Writer and former editor of “The Paris Review,” X.J. Kennedy, wrote that her first volume “ought to have been a candidate for a Pulitzer.” Her verse novel, “The Lalaurie Horror,” debuted as an Amazon bestseller in Epic Poetry. Her work has been anthologized in Random House, London’s Everyman’s Library, and in The Hudson Review’s historic, Poets Translate Poets, among many other anthologies. Her translations of French, Russian, Cherokee and various Native American languages have appeared in POETRY, Rattle, The Hudson Review, Able Muse, and elsewhere. Her sixth collection, INDIGENOUS, is forthcoming from Able Muse Press. Her website is www.jenniferreeser.com
Tim Love’s publications are a poetry pamphlet Moving Parts (HappenStance, 2010) and a story
collection By all means (Nine Arches Press, 2012). He lives in Cambridge, UK. His poetry and prose have appeared in Stand, Rialto, Magma, Short Fiction, New Walk, etc. He blogs at http://litrefs.blogspot.com/
Chris O’Carroll is a Light magazine featured poet whose work has also appeared in Better
Than Starbucks!, Lighten Up Online, Measure, Parody, and Snakeskin, among other journals,
and in Kansas Time + Place, New York City Haiku, The Best of the Barefoot Muse, and The Great
American Wise Ass Poetry Anthology.
David Danoff’’s poems and reviews have appeared in Poet Lore, The Raintown Review,
Measure, The Lyric, Snakeskin, Antiphon, Unsplendid, Tikkun, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Pleiades,
and elsewhere. He lives in the Washington, DC area and works for the federal government.
William Doreski lives in Peterborough, New Hampshire. He has published three critical
studies and several collections of poetry. His work has appeared in many journals. He has taught writing and literature at Emerson, Goddard, Boston University, and Keene State College. His new poetry collection is A Black River, A Dark Fall. He has a blog at williamdoreski.blogspot.com and is on Twitter at @wdoreski. Leslie Schultz (Northfield, MN) is the author of Still Life with Poppies: Elegies and Cloud Song
(Kelsay Books, 2016, 2018). She has published poetry, fiction, and essays in a variety of journals
and anthologies, including Able Muse, Blue Unicorn, Light, Mezzo Cammin, Poetic Strokes
Anthology, The Pacific Review, The Northern Review, The Madison Review, The Mid-American
Poetry Review, The Midwest Quarterly, The Orchards, Stone Country; Sun Dog; Swamp Lily, The
Wayfarer, Third Wednesday, and in a chapbook, Living Room (Midwestern Writers’ Publishing
House). She has twice had winning poems in the Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest. Schultz posts
poems, essays, reviews, interviews, and photographs at www.winonamedia.net.
Susan McLean is an English professor at Southwest Minnesota State University. She has
published two books of poetry, The Best Disguise and The Whetstone Misses the Knife, and one book of her translations of the Latin poet Martial, Selected Epigrams (University of Wisconsin Press, 2014).
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Audra Coleman lives in Asheville, North Carolina where she is earning her MLAS at UNCA.
She has been honored to see her work in poetry, fiction and creative non-fiction appear in WNC
Woman, Mothers Always Write, The Good Mother Project, 3288 Review, Kestrel, Palaver, Quail
Bell Magazine and The Great Smokies Review.
Taylor Graham is a volunteer search-and-rescue dog handler in the Sierra Nevada and
serves as El Dorado County’s first poet laureate (2016-2018). Her work has appeared in The Iowa Review, New York Quarterly, Poet Lore, Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere. She’s included in the anthologies Villanelles (Everyman’s Library) and California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present (Santa Clara University/Heyday Books). Her latest book is Uplift (Cold River Press, 2016).
Peter Vertacnik lives in the Bluegrass region of Kentucky, where he teaches high school. His
poems have appeared in Lucid Rhythms, Asses of Parnassus, and Autumn Sky Poetry Daily.
Terese Coe’s poems and translations have appeared in Orchards, Able Muse, Agenda, The
Cincinnati Review, Measure, The Moth, New American Writing, New Scottish Writing, New Walk,
Ploughshares, Poetry, Poetry Review, The Stinging Fly, Threepenny Review, and
the TLS, among many other journals and anthologies. Her collection Shot Silk (Kelsay Books)
was listed for the 2017 Poets Prize, and she has received grants from Giorno Poetry Systems
and others. Copies of her poem “More” were heli-dropped across London as part of the 2012
Olympics Rain of Poems.
David Landrum has been published widely, most recently in The Ghazal Page, Three Drops
from a Cauldron, Raintown Review, Quixotica, and Measure. His poem “Tan Yunxia” was recently
included in the anthology The Best of Cha: A Journal of Asian Literature. He teaches Literature
at Grand Valley State University in Michigan.
Marc Frazier has widely published poetry in journals including The Spoon River Poetry
Review, ACM, Good Men Project, f(r)iction, The Gay and Lesbian Review, Slant, Permafrost,
Plainsongs, and Poet Lore. He has had memoir from his book WITHOUT: A MEMOIR published
in Gravel, The Good Men Project, decomP, Autre, Cobalt Magazine, Evening Street Review, and
Punctuate. He is the recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Award for poetry, has been featured on
Verse Daily, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and a “best of the net.” His book The
Way Here and his two chapbooks are available on Amazon as well as his second full-length
collection titled Each Thing Touches (Glass Lyre Press). His website is www.marcfrazier.org
Rose Mary Boehm is a German-born UK national, Rose Mary Boehm lives and works in Lima,
Peru. Author of TANGENTS, a poetry collection published in the UK in 2010/2011, her work has
been widely published in US poetry journals (online and print). She was twice winner of the
Goodreads monthly competition, a new poetry collection (From the Ruhr to Somewhere Near
Dresden 1939-1949: A Child’s Journey) has been published by Aldrich Press in May 2016, and a
new collection (Peru Blues) 2018 has been published by Kelsay Books.
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Just so you know, Edmund Conti has a book forthcoming from Kelsay Books. Just so you
know, it is titled, “Just So You Know.” (He thought you would like to know that.) He would like to
tell you he has over 500 poems published, but that would be bragging. Besides, it is closer to 600
by now. Edmund won the first Willard Espy Foundation Prize for light verse in 2001.He must have
other achievements, after all, he is 89. And counting.
Katherine Barrett Swett currently has work up at Mezzo Cammin and forthcoming in
Measure and The Raintown Review. Her sonnets were finalists in the 2016 and 2017 Nemerov
Contest.
Sally Cook is both artist and poet. Her written work regularly appears in national print journals
such as National Review, Chronicles, Lighten Up On Line, The Orchards, Pennsylvania Review and Trinacria. She is a former Wilbur Fellow and six-time Pushcart Prize nominee. A 2013 Aldrich Press Poetry Book Award Competition resulted in her third book, The View From Here, which may be seen on Amazon.
Robert Donohue’s poetry has appeared in Measure, The Raintown Review and 2 Bridges
Review. His verse play, In One Piece, a comedy about Vincent van Gogh, was given a staged
reading by The Red Harlem readers. He lives on Long Island, NY.
Robin Helweg-Larsen is British-born but Bahamian-raised. His education came from good
schools, hitchhiking on five continents and working all over the place. His poetry has mostly been
published in the UK (Snakeskin, Ambit, etc), but also in the US (The Lyric, The HyperTexts, etc),
Canada, Australia and India. He lives in his hometown of Governor’s Harbour on Eleuthera.
C.B. Anderson was the longtime gardener for the PBS television series, The Victory
Garden. Many hundreds of his poems have appeared in numerous print and electronic journals
from several continents since 2003. His first book of poetry, Mortal Soup and the Blue
Yonder, was published in 2013 by White Violet Press.
Ted Charnley holds a BA from Quinnipiac University, a JD from University of Maryland and
has studied poetry at Johns Hopkins University. This is his second appearance in The Orchards
(December 2016). His work has also appeared in such journals as The Road Not Taken, Think,
The Lyric and Slant. He lives with his wife in a 200-year old farmhouse they restored in western
Maryland. There, he herds woodchucks, practices chainsaw topiary and makes offerings to the
nymphs of the springs.
Phil Huffy is a reformed lawyer from Rochester, New York. For years he pursued a hobby of
song writing and musical performance, taking him to shows in seven states. Since the words
were often better than the music, poetry has turned out a worthy endeavor. Recent placements
include Anapest, Westward Quarterly, Poets Reading The News and several haiku journals.
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