Porchlight: Issue 5

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CONTENTS

Mix Tape For You by Sean Loughlin       4
Boo Yow and Jesus is Not Pulling His Weight by Kelly Coveny     5
Great Blue Heron at Havasu Creek by Raggio Colby     8
White Knuckle by Mangesh Naik        9
The Disconnect by Leslie Wolf Plajzer       13
The Subjugated Ones by Suad Khatab Ali      14
Mr. Disagreeable Embraces The Whole Bad Neighbor Thing by Gabriel Welsch 23
Have You Seen Sadie by Amanda Shapiro       25
Photography by Rob Shore         33
The Rabbi Who Could Smell The Presence of the Lord by Stephen G. Bloom 36
Lily Pad and Photograph by Keith Moul       50
Puppy Love: A Dog-Eared Romance by A.W.Strouse     51

CONTRIBUTORS

Sean Loughlin currently resides in Brooklyn, NY and works as an Account Representative for Apple, Inc. His interests include fall weather, photo blogs, whisky, and bicycle rides. He also enjoys writing short poems when he’s had enough to drink. Sean’s mix tape days are few and far between at this point.
Then again, effortless style is a bizarre wisdom. Not all situations call for such forms of creativity.

Kelly Coveny is a published poet, essayist, novelist, commissioned screenwriter, and lyricist/singer. She is also an advertising writer/creative director last employed at Saatchi & Saatchi on the Olay, Crest, and Old Spice accounts. She has won awards from Archive, Communications Art, and the New York Songwriters Circle. She lives with her husband, two sons and dogs in lower Connecticut. Her albums, books and other creative work can be viewed at pancakefaktory.com.

Raggio Colby lives in Denver, Colorado. He has previously published work in The Mountain Gazette and Fetishes, the now-defunct literary journal of the University of Colorado Medical School.

Mangesh Naik lives and works in Pune, India. He works full-time for a software giant and dabbles in poetry and paranormal research in his spare time. His poems have appeared in Thieves Jargon, Autumn Sky Poetry, Gloom Cupboard, and are forthcoming in Tipton Poetry Journal.

Leslie Wolf Plajzer lives in Baltimore with her husband Floodsy and their daughter Sarah. She is a Senior Agent with the Maryland Division of Parole and Probation and recently celebrated 23 years clean in Narcotics Anonymous.

Suad Khatab Ali is a young writer living in the Middle East. Her first collection of stories, Haram, won the Said Al-Hazzah medal from the Qatar Academy of Arts, and her first novel will be coming out next year from UAC Press.

Gabriel Welsch is the author of the collection Dirt and All Its Dense Labor (2006) and the forthcoming chapbook, An Eye Fluent in Gray (2010). He also writes fiction, publishing it in Georgia Review, Ascent, Southern Review, New Letters, Mid-American Review, Chautauqua, Other Voices, and elsewhere. He currently works as vice president of advancement and marketing at Juniata College, in Huntingdon, PA, where he lives with his wife and two daughters.

Amanda Shapiro was born in California and raised in Connecticut. An MFA candidate at Columbia University, she is writing a collection of short stories about people in transit. She is currently somewhere in Alaska.

Rob Shore is a writer, photographer, and filmmaker. His writing and photography has been featured in the Fifth Wednesday Journal, Juked, and on The Best American Poetry Blog. His essay “Time Travel” is forthcoming in the book Resident Aliens (Harvard University Press). He wrote and directed the documentary film And Many More. Rob currently lives in Washington, D.C., where he does New Media for the FrameWorks Institute.

Stephen G. Bloom teaches narrative writing in the School of Journalism at the University of Iowa, where he is a professor and the Bessie Dutton Murray Professional Scholar. He is the author of Tears of Mermaids: The Secret Story of Pearls, Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America, Inside
the Writer’s Mind, and co-author (with Peter Feldstein) of The Oxford Project. His stories have appeared in many journals and magazines.

Keith Moul was born in 1945 and raised in St. Louis. He married Sylvia in 1967 and has one child, a daughter Ianthe who is a fine artist (www.iantheart.com). Keith translated and published Anglo-Saxon poems under James Dickey’s supervision while completing his PhD at the University of South Carolina. His poems have appeared for more than 40 years in the US and Canada, and more recently in Britain and Australia. He also publishes photos.

A.W. Strouse, a native of rural Pennsylvania, lives in Washington Heights, New York City. He believes in the power of language to miraculously transubstantiate reality. As a Bennett Fellow at Fordham University’s Center for Medieval Studies, he researches late antique and medieval poetry. Currently, he is “editing” a collection of hymns written by his alter ego, the late-20th century mystic, Claire O. Casey. More of his work may be found at http://thepropagandaofmylove.blogspot.com.