The Poetry of William Walsh

Speculative Friction

“The bear wasn’t ready for winter, or me/sitting behind the glow of fire/he could not see through/or the Montana Longbow sleeping on a log./My dozen poached trout could’ve landed me a few nights/in the county jail, a hefty fine, not much/to curb the onset of winter, just enough/for this weekend. Maybe, in his weakness,/I could have taken him, but it wouldn’t have been sporting/to lay the ragged housecoat down with a Broadhead . . . .”—William Walsh

By Claire Bateman, Poetry Editor

GREENVILLE South Carolina—(Hubris)—December 2025—William Walsh is an award-winning poet and novelist, the author of eleven books, editor of the James Dickey Review, and director of the Etowah Valley Low-Residency MFA program at Reinhardt University. His work has appeared in AWP Chronicle, Five Points, Flannery O’Connor Review, The Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, North American Review, Poetry Daily, Poets & Writers, Rattle, and Shenandoah. His novel, Haircuts for the Dead, was published in August by Mercer University Press. Four years in the making, Flannery O’Connor’s Andalusia: The Georgia Dairy Farm and Its Influence in Her Fiction comprises a new exploration of the impetus of O’Connor’s fiction, to be published in April 2026 by McFarland & Co.

Walsh writes: “When young, you dream of being acknowledged for your writing—that happens to few writers early on, as most of us are looking in the window at other writers’ success. I thought publishing and accolades meant everything. What is most important, though, is the students I’ve taught who have gone on to publish. 

“I saw it in the last years of David Bottoms’ life. Publishing does not always lead to others creating their own poetry, but there’s something extraordinary if you can teach another person to write. David always wanted to know if his students were publishing and took great delight in seeing our success. It creates a poetry DNA. For instance, my literary DNA traces back from David Bottoms and Jack Elliott Myers to their influences: Robert Penn Warren, Richard Hugo, and Theodore Roethke; then back to Walt Whitman. 

“As a poet, I scrutinize each word, not to mention the 80,000 words in a novel. One day, a student asked me to guide him through the step-by-step process of writing a poem from beginning to end. I started with a horrible draft about my daughter’s high school cross-country meet. When standing too close to the school tent, she shooed me away, embarrassed to be seen with me. That ‘shooing away’ was the impetus for the poem. 

“I began to develop the narrative, which took about twelve weeks. Routinely, I brought it in for the class to see my progress and discussed what was changed and why. I came to understand that it was all a metaphor for my daughter’s running away from me, and if I did not allow her to run, she was running regardless. However, if I gave her the freedom to run, she would return. It was the last poem included in Fly Fishing in Times Square.”

Why Otters Hold Hands
By William Walsh

I want to live in a small town like Lakewood,
where the fastest thing is a sailboat without wind.

I want to know the world is safe for my daughter,
that I never have to share my failures, a place,

where, if I ever lose my religion again, someone
will return it to my house, ring the bell

and if I am not home, they’ll leave
it on the mat. I want a kid selling scout popcorn

or Christmas paper to stop me at the grocery store
and I want a kid on every corner selling Kool-Aid

from a card table, and a kid asking to rake my leaves.
I want the woman down the street to wear her bikini

while pushing the mower. I want a parade through town
every Fourth of July, and I want Friday fish fries

at the church. I want to hear my daughter singing
in the shower while I’m cooking spaghetti, straining

the angel hair while she’s crowing like Iris Dement,
lost to herself, having forgotten the rest of the world can hear her.

I want to sit at the kitchen table, listening, just listening.
There’s so much, and yet, I can never have it again:

Dora the Explorer, helicopter rides, or watching a documentary
on The Life of Otters, how we laughed

at the Dog Fails on YouTube, scrunched up together on the sofa
eating popcorn with too much salt, dripping with butter,

and drinking Cokes on a school night.
I want my daughter to walk with me

in the mall and not down the other side
like I am an alien, the family embarrassment

who mortifies her. Because,
this morning, at the cross-country meet

my daughter shooed me away when I stood too close
to the school tent talking to the other parents.

Loosening up, the girls stretch, run wind sprints
toward womanhood. There’s no chance of her winning this race.

Just work on your best time, I told her. She shooed me away again.
I know this is the future, what I haven’t quite prepared for.

There will be other, more important races, I want to say.
The field is stacked with nearly two hundred girls,

most giggling about something the parents don’t understand.
As she pushes forward through the crown of girlhood,

I remember the otters holding hands while sleeping
so they won’t drift apart.

(“Why Otters Hold Hands” was originally published in Fly Fishing in Times Square.)

Brook Trout Along the Ellijay River
By William Walsh

With acorns dropping through the widow-maker branches
and bouncing to the ground, I scraped sparks
from a magnesium bar. The glint, like speckled birds,
flew across the kindling to catch and push back the frost line.

Three brookies, not quite legal, slow roasted
on a Pignut Hickory skewer. How deep into the woods
is deep enough, I wondered, to be alone
in the darkness and silence, to find myself,
to hear what the world doesn’t want to give up.
I warmed around the pit of coals, thinking
how too many wounds still lie open.
A meteor shower arched across the sky, a quiver of noise
crunched in the brush beyond the trees,
and then into camp, a black bear, unexpectedly, too thin
to hunt, his nose eating the air for my meal.

The bear wasn’t ready for winter, or me
sitting behind the glow of fire
he could not see through
or the Montana Longbow sleeping on a log.
My dozen poached trout could’ve landed me a few nights
in the county jail, a hefty fine, not much
to curb the onset of winter, just enough
for this weekend. Maybe, in his weakness,
I could have taken him, but it wouldn’t have been sporting
to lay the ragged housecoat down with a Broadhead.

The bear eyed the trout sizzling with butter
and lemon-garlic, sat puzzled by the flame
and how to fight the smolder on his paws, swatting
the flickers as he reached into the hive of embers,
pulled back by the sting of heat. From my cooler,
I grabbed a brookie not much longer than my hand,
tossed it through the fire to his feet, a miracle
he must have thought, fish leaping out of flame,
cold and fresh and gutted.

When I had finished with the last fish,
thrown farther away, toward the tree line, he saw me
standing behind the fire, gold-glow and shadowed.
I wondered if I appeared to him as an angel
of the forest, some Promethean fishwife rising
from the coals, or out of the deepest cave.

And then, full of brook trout, but still famished, he rose
on to his hindquarters. Out of the fire, the arrow struck.

(“Brook Trout Along the Ellijay River” was originally published in Fly Fishing in Times Square.)

What Gordon Parks Saw in 1943
By William Walsh

He stood a block from the Amoco gas station,
while several people loitered outside Slack’s Drugstore,

the unadorned, regular people, nothing spectacular
to write home about, just a street scene

cracked against the backdrop
of history. But there was a woman walking

with intent—most certainly, long dead—maybe
she’s late for work or hurrying to fill a prescription  

for her sick daughter who missed school.
For some reason, Parks decided to lift his camera, focus 

and capture a world we no longer recognize. And yet,
here I am today, scouring the internet for this particular street,

which by all appearances no longer exists,
either widened or, most likely, completely razed 

to make way for a Publix or a Ford dealership,
or better, a CVS or a Popeyes.

The photo is known as Howard’s Chicken Shack
because of the sign cemented in the sidewalk

on a metal pole with a bicycle leaning against it.
If you pay attention to the back of the car

parked in front of the sign, you’ll notice
you’re at 559 2nd Avenue in Daytona Beach 

sixteen years before the engines roared at the 500.
Across the street, the Palms Café advertises coffee 

and R. L. Smith, the manager, keeps things brewing.
The Black Cat was next door, without a doubt, the hippest joint

on the block where they played the blues so deep
into the morning hours, it left a hunger for a woman 

only a three-month stint in the county lockup
can erase. And when the piano player woke 

in the afternoon, famished and too tired to cook,
they called Howard’s Chicken Shack, which had a patio 

and wine, and if you dialed 9363,
they’d deliver anything but the blues.

A Banquet to Honor President-elect William Howard Taft
By William Walsh

Like some ground-dwelling monkey from the late Cenozoic Era,
a South American connoisseur of ticks and rattlesnakes,

I found you yesterday morning, delivered in death
to my backyard, ugly snarl from heaven.

What could you have been scrounging for
on my postage stamp of suburbia, your mouth

open in an eternal scream and tiny pearls of sharpness
for cracking bones and gnawing on sinew.

The Powhatans called you white dog, but you are no dog.
No dog had such ugliness of sin on his breath, nor stench,

nor so apt at feigning death or winning an Academy Award
for Best Opossum in a Backyard Production of I Fell from a Tree.

Considered by some to be edible in times of famine, eating your tail
is a folk remedy to improve fertility, but I’ll never find out. 

William Strachey, poet of hurricanes, called you a beast
in bigness of a pig and in taste alike, 

but I’ll never know that, either. Maybe old Bill was right
and all along knew your fate: “Twas the trump of death 

that blew / My hour has come.” So much glamour
in your reputation, with two lovers in your pouch: 

Opossum Society of the United States and the National Opossum Society.
Who would have guessed the need for one? 

The pong of your oils lingered for days
in the grass near the porch stairs, and I am sad to think 

what misfortune left you to the sun. What happened
to cause this marsupial tragedy?

In Atlanta in 1909—Possum and ‘Taters
honored the soon-to-be president with honeyed tails 

and tender meat, and sweet potatoes. So, today,
I honor you with a small cardboard box

and a trinity of trash bags, one stuffed inside the other,
and another, and an elegiac sigh at the curb.