O tulip, tulip, you bloom all day and later sway a deep-waisted limbo above the dinner table, waiting for a coin to drop into your well, for the stars to pin your stem to their lapel. Soon, on ocean winds, dawn cries its devotion, our world entranced once more into being. Let go your sumptuous…
I walk uptown with a letter in my head, past the piers and the languishing seals, the spiral of a spring day, landmark, harbor, inlet and bay; the ocean into more ocean, the gray of a gray sky. Dear God. Dear Absentee Landlord Who Collects the Checks. Dear Barbershop Glass and Barbicide Blue. Dear Recession…
The Look2 essay series, which replaces our print book reviews, takes a closer look at the careers of accomplished authors who have yet to receive the full appreciation that their work deserves. Reviews of new books can still be found on our blog at http://pshares.org. Devastating partings—man from woman, person from place—haunt the…
1. Know your origin: you are a token of the afterwards of love. What flinches in the ribbon of your utterly new blood is nothing but the echo of a bed post— pulse. You have grown up. From filament within your mother’s bulb, you have evolved into a chandelier of bones, weightlessly orbiting your portion…
All winter the ghosts were waiting for a new high-school teacher who refused to appear, and so you were roped in. February had the year on pause, the days like holes that tripped you over and over in the frozen yard. You had no knowledge of history or chemistry yet were expected to teach the…
In this borrowed house I keep my doors unlocked. A day in the middle of days where if not for worry I’d be alone. I’m cold as vodka. I dress myself back to warmth. Two dogs curl asleep downstairs. One gets up to align an invisible orbit then falls, graceless thud against hardwood. O marriage…
John C. Zacharis Award Ploughshares is pleased to present Lysley Tenorio with the twenty-third annual John C. Zacharis Award for his short-story collection, Monstress (Ecco 2012). The $1500 award, which is named after Emerson College’s former president, honors the best debut book by a Ploughshares writer, alternating annually between poetry and fiction. This year’s judge was…
to Sleep I’ll count backward from a thousand till my teeth begin to grind, down to zero, where the digits tilt and swivel in a ring around the racing eye of the tornado I’m made of tonight. Left alive, I am an opening too wide, much too much gaping sky to slip behind the…
My hair was not on fire and the fabric of my shirt didn’t rub me the wrong way. It was the best day of my life when I entered the monastery. My heart was not on fire but enclosed by a high wall and covered with new grasses for the white cow who had taken…
No products in the cart.