Poets

Claude Clayton Smith

Claude Clayton Smith is Professor Emeritus of English at Ohio Northern University and the author of 8 books and co-editor/translator of two others, most recently MEDITATIONS After the Bear Feast: The Poetic Dialogues of N. Scott Momaday and Yuri Vaella (Shanti Arts, 2016).

His own work has been translated into five languages, including Russian and Chinese.

claudeclaytonsmith.wordpress.com

Leah Mueller

Leah Mueller is an independent writer from Tacoma, Washington. She is the author of one chapbook, “Queen of Dorksville” (Crisis Chronicles Press, 2012), and two books, “Allergic to Everything” (Writing Knights Press, 2015) and “The Underside of the Snake” (Red Ferret Press, 2015). Leah was a winner in the 2012 Wergle Flomp Humor Poetry Contest, and a featured poet at the 2015 New York Poetry Festival. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Blunderbuss, Outlook Springs, University of Chicago Memoryhouse, Atticus Review, Open Thought Vortex, Sadie Girl Press, Origins Journal, Quail Bell, Silver Birch Press, and many other publications.

•

Karlo Sevilla

Karlo Sevilla is a freelance writer who lives in Quezon City, Philippines. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Philippines Graphic, Yellow Chair Review, Radius Lit, Spillwords, Indiana Voice Journal, Rambutan Literary, Pilgrim, Antarctica Journal, Sub-saharan Magazine, Wraith Infirmity Muses, and elsewhere.

An ardent practitioner of the martial art Brazilian Luta Livre, he is the 2016 Southeast Asian ADCC Submission Fighting champion in the -83 kg., intermediate division.

•

Duane L. Herrmann

Duane L. Herrmann, a reluctant carbon-based life-form, was surprised to find himself in 1951 on a farm in Kansas. He’s still trying to make sense of it but has grown fond of grass waving under wind, trees and moonlight. He aspires to be a hermit, but would miss his children, grandchildren and a few friends. He is known to carry baby kittens in his mouth, pet snakes, and converse with owls, but is careful not to anger them! He survived a traumatic, abusive childhood embellished with dyslexia, ADHD (both unknown at the time), cyclothymia, now, PTSD.

He has several chapbooks including A Mixt Life, Family Plowing, Remnants of a Life, Praise the King of Glory, No Known Address, Gedichte aus Prairies of Possibilities, Zephers of the Heart, and Into the Wind (to be released summer 2024). And, coming soon a collection of short stories: Exaltation, stories of spiritual adventure. Individual work is published in Midwest Quarterly, Little Balkans review, Flint Hills Quarterly, Orison, Inscape and others in print and online. He has been the recipient of a Robert Hayden Poetry Fellowship: 1989 and the Ferguson Kansas History Book Award: 2007.

•

Catherine Zickgraf

Catherine Zickgraf has performed her poetry in Madrid, San Juan, and three dozen other cities, but now her main jobs are to hang out with her family and write poetry. Her work has appeared in Journal of the American Medical Association, Pank, Victorian Violet Press, and The Grief Diaries. Her chapbook, Soul Full of Eye, is published through Aldrich Press and is available on Amazon.

Watch and read more of her poetry at https://caththegreat.blogspot.com

On her enjoyment writing acrostics: 'Though I love to find increasingly complex ways to write acrostics, I also love the simplicity of the idea. I hope my poem encourages readers to experiment with this form as well."

•

► Catherine's microchaps & selected poems are available below.

Origami Microchap	Poems
An April Eden
Click title to download microchap Cover collage by JanK •	Freed She slips her neck chains, heads for the Red Sea where it’s dammed and divided by Divine hands— a victory over centuries of wailing prayer. Stones Like threaded grooves of a clock screw, ramps channeled rocks to build up walls. She’s folding towels, a spire falls. The centuries are not coming back. Nothing lasts forever. She shivers as CNN shows the fire. Churches of trees will burn— but only burial can melt the stones when the earth takes back its own. - Feb 2020, Stick Figure Poetry published a version of “Stones.” Wisteria* Vines climb branches, laddering leaves toward the sky beside highways through open Georgia. Tendrils hook their twining toes around the twigs of Chestnut Oak. They invade, it’s said. They pull down the Yellow Poplars. Here on this land brushed with lavender poison, her predecessors’ spirits still live in the roots. Under draping grapes wrapping every thought her tissues will rot when the forests collapse.	Storm Inside the bruised universe, a beauty of welts and dirt blood lullaby the moon. From the firs come strained verses and tunes. Fools in vain raise balloons to elsewhere realms, muddy ruins the wind dunes seldom tame. Eden Out of the Garden rose joyful beings who were later removed in mourning. Down the valley a gale stirred the creek, and flood waves uprooted the mountains. Against the moon, the last rain drips from her eaves like lace in the freshness of night. Ascent She is blessed in the royalty of morning arrows dressed in linen from afar and through the clouds. She is born of stars, flushed honey of light. She is sky and its flight, laughing gold-glow of joy. • Catherine Zickgraf © 2022
Overnight
Click title to download microchap Cover collage by JanK - Author's Note: Sept 2018, Furtive Dalliance Literary Review published these poems in print only. This press is on indefinite hiatus. Origami Poems is the perfect format. •	*Ballerina* Into my window fall stars long as dreams, I slip through the screen. Night grows a poem stretching prima toes to cross street then creek stepping soft on the forest floor. Over shivering beds of dark stones, the sparkle-moon follows me home. *Stereo* Even through moon and drizzle, the train plumes billowing into the clouds navigate my backyard valley. They vibrate my candle flame until its last breath sifts out the window, when whistles trail off and tracks flow into the starlight horizon. *Linens* The pines don’t drip with shadows behind our house, out of reach of the streetlight. Past the creek line bordering our woods, the oak leaves close their eyes. The creatures of the low sky hush us calm, I’m returning my mind to its dream. • Catherine Zickgraf © 2020
Household
Click title to download PDF microchap Cover collage by JanKeough · Every Origami Microchap may be printed, for free, from this website. •	1. Laundry When the morning opens in its glory and the bluebell sky comes alive, clouds fly in like cotton shirts on clotheslines across the blue. So my pillowcases pinned across the line go sailing toward the backyard pines on rope around posts at the edge of the world. 2. Dishes My kitchen windowsill sprouts buds of lantana, blue glories around a skyline of jade vases, a daisy pot holding some watercolor brushes. Soft vines lean their afternoon shadows on bananas that curl in Grandmom’s Wedgewood dish. Her African violet above my sink breathes in the window light. 3. Soup I’ve dissolved the broth cubes, set cans of tomatoes by the stove, egg noodles, carrots-corn-peas, wisps of onions. When all my family gets home I’ll fill them with the peace that thickens the herbed air in the waning sunset of my kitchen.	4. Bedding A nocturne lures down its calm in the evergreen heaven. Night blankets us over. We’re nested like robins. We all fall silent like the sky. 5. Dream Below the opal glow that hangs in the dark, the moondial trees move through the ferns. quiet of slow shadows - The night and fallen pines litter railroad ties. The branches are dry as ghosts of vines and lost trains that go riding through the woods. 6. Sunrise Again, the beginning, the dim horizon spreads with glory. In the newness of another morning, gold falls over our summer comforter, its cornflower blues bloom around us. Past the curtains, the earth stirs through drips of dawn on the leaves, — finches in the trees everything sings according to its nature. • Catherine Zickgraf © 2019
Long Line of Horizon
Click above title to download microchap Cover: Rising Up Dawn by Lauri Burke •	(1) We can mire ourselves in war. We delight in our small mirth, but our feet still pace like ants on the lithic face of our Earth. (2) Long ago mornings, the whole world falling beside her ear in drips of dawn and leaf-breeze, birds filled the trees, all things sang according their nature. (3) She tends her piles, maintaining them in bundles that cover her floor and its land- scape. She keeps bins of files from third grade through grad school, draping them in calico to make them her cotton tables.	(4) She knows she is just one puzzle piece. Earth’s living things number more than its sand. Her stream is a strand against the Nile’s width. But it is the lifeblood of this tract. As greens thrive when it’s stable, gulp in the flood, we all live so small, melting in memories of the land. (5) Tapping another brush, the painter folds the white wind into blue atmosphere and drags paint across the canvas. She spreads out the swift-moving sky that blew him home from war and the guns, needing only his precious wife and all their sweet-smelling little ones. (6) Where rivers scoop lakes at their estuaries, the marble she holds is encasing the oceans. Seeking the self inside, she is polishing the sky’s eye. Pulling knotted rope up the river- side, she swings into a long line of horizon. • Catherine Zickgraf © 2017
Acrostic Joy
Click above title to download microchap Cover: 'Conception Mandala' by Lauri Burke • Poet’s Comment Though I love to find increasingly complex ways to write acrostics, I also love the simplicity of the idea. I hope my poem encourages readers to experiment with this form as well. •	Acrostic Joy The joy of inner peace— like fathoming ocean. We are years of light from the soul of the sun.· The joy of inner peace— Through Heaven’s Evening, Journeying On Years Of Future Ideas, Night Narrows Every Road, Pauses Every Aching Current’s Electricity. like fathoming ocean. Living Inside Kind Eyes, Feeling A Tired High, Our Minds Invoke Night Guides, Opening cages - Emptying Any Nests..	We are years of light When Everywhere Are Ripped Eyelids, You Enter And Resolve, Stitching Our Fingernails Like Iridescent Gates. Hold Tight When Emptiness And Reminders Elevate Yesterday. Eternity At Rest, Souls Of the Faithful Live In God’s Hidden Thoughts.· from the soul of the sun. Fear Rends Our Minds. To Heal, Each Star Offers Us Lullabying Orchestras, Freeing The Heart, Ending Silence and Untouched Night. • Catherine Zickgraf © 2017

Cathy Barber

Cathy Barber's poetry has been published recently in Pinyon, SLAB and Kestrel in the anthologies, The Cancer Poetry Project 2, which won Midwest Book Awards’ Best Poetry Book of 2013, and Changing Harm to Harmony, an anthology about bullying. Atlas and Alice nominated her “Three Short Love Poems,” for a Best of the Net award 2015. She is a graduate of the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing program.

•

Stephen Toft

Stephen Toft is a poet and homelessness worker who lives in Lancaster, UK with his girlfriend and their children. His first collection "the kissing bridge" was published by Red Moon Press in 2008 and in December 2016 Scars Publications released his chapbook "naming a storm: haiku and tanka".

•

Oz Hardwick

Oz Hardwick is a York-based poet, photographer, music journalist, and occasional musician. He has published countless poems internationally, in journals and anthologies, as well as having work performed in musical settings and as part of art and film collaborations. His most recent poetry collection is The Ringmaster’s Apprentice (Valley Press, 2014), and he is co-author, with Amina Alyal, of the Saboteur-shortlisted Close as Second Skins (IDP, 2015).

As a viable alternative to poverty, Oz is Professor of English at Leeds Trinity University, and has written extensively on misericords and animal iconography in the Middle Ages under the pseudonym of Paul Hardwick.

In a perfect world, Oz would be bassist in a Belgian space-rock band.

www.ozhardwick.co.uk

•