That glass of wine suspended in air decades ago—3D projection still a tactile memory, the ruby liquid shimmering as if just poured into its goblet, the hands reaching out, all of us incredulous then believing before this chalice raised to science and art. And now in Japan, rising pop diva cat girl Hatsune Miku—high-def, green-haired…
John C. Zacharis Award Ploughshares is pleased to present Heidy Steidlmayer with the twenty-second annual John C. Zacharis Award for her poetry collection Fowling Piece (Triquarterly Books, 2011). The $1,500 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…
In the end there is always a little change in the pockets, a few suns and moons you couldn’t spend. Nearby the cloud of a would-be breath doesn’t move, reprieved but useless. This candle will change all that. Use the last bit of air for light, and heat the hand that shields…
Valium, Librium, and Tylenol with codeine—that’s what Velma the head nurse at the Florida House of Representatives would dish out when you came in with your period, a hangover, a cold, a broken arm, a hangnail. She called it the Triple, as in It sounds like you need a Triple or That calls for a…
On a good day, surgery lasts three minutes or less. Today’s takes longer. Kathryn has an audience. They don’t touch the fish at this point—they try to handle them as little as possible—but for the girl, Kathryn makes an exception. She wets her hand in a clear plastic bucket and lifts the stunned fish from…
Of late, I have been collecting vintage radios, a distracting hobby that I am mostly ambivalent about in comparison with sincere radio enthusiasts, which explains why I only own a handful. They are scattered throughout my house. The Fisher Model 100 sits regally aged in the living room between the fireplace and my bay window…
That’s how much time they give you to bribe the hall of records for the paperwork you bribe the foreman to sign, swearing you know nothing and owe nothing—no loans, no debts before you bribe a woman to sell your pots and pans, plates, plants, rugs, and record player, so you can bribe a dentist…
When I saw her in her urban kitchen— thin and smart in her charity-shop green dress— a glass wall was between us polished spotless with some soft cloth of mistrust. All winter she’d lived up the hill in the gray house with the damp walls, the rains fading the fields. The snow— its ice-floe memories…
I’ve watched this ultrasound so often I close my eyes and picture a daughter feathered with pixels, a putto’s skeleton. So here is a piece of art I own, a representation any impressionist would be proud of for it moves, though it doesn’t yet move me. But I do return, so she has achieved what…
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