for Sangchen Tsomo Today it looks like a radiant darkness within the body and the sound of the dove in morning and evening and how the machine of my mind is never silent and how I pray for silence like a rain cloud combed through branches. Or the dove’s slow sound above last year’s…
but don’t read this poem whose title implies I think you’re old but you are at least older than me time passing makes everyone old unless death and I don’t want that which is not to say I’m terrified but don’t not read this poem because you’ve died! I’d rather insult you what I mean…
From my diary, April 22, 1994: …came home to the news that Richard Nixon, a man who let me down again and again, and to whom I felt deeply connected—whether I was wearing a Nixon-Lodge button at the age of 9, or having a shouting match with my father over the Cambodian invasion ten years…
You said yourself, if it has a mouth you mustn’t trust it. May you lose this fight. Dragging the double-blade over your leg in the shower you think of his face. Such power you found in bathing him, his tattoos—needled with guitar strings and Bic ink while others kept watch down-tier: a woman with seven…
Asking two memoir writers to have a conversation, as Ploughshares’ editor did when she suggested I write Nick Flynn’s profile, almost assures an interview without biography. Memoir writers are vague on matters of record. We’re interested in using fact and detail. We’re interested in the gorgeous influence of pain in all its mystery and nonsense….
John C. Zacharis Award Ploughshares is pleased to present Christine Sneed with the twenty-first annual John C. Zacharis First Book Award for her short story collection, Portraits of a Few of the People I’ve Made Cry (University of Massachusetts Press, 2010). The $1,500 award, which is named after Emerson College’s former president, honors the best…
The hurricane’s advance team of breezes administers a poll to my oak trees. The author, having scented disaster, having been awake for hours, advises his trees not to answer. Telephones trill on nightstands, requiring weary authorities to sit on the edges of their beds with their heads in their hands as instructed by disaster movies….
The Inca gave the lightless places names. Fox, toad, serpent. A black llama with faint eyes. The space between my hands and the keyboard. I have forgotten how the sonata begins. Photo printed in black and white, so that the wine looks clear. The mirror in a dark room, waiting for monsters. In the city…
Grizzly bears, electric bears, fire bears—these three are the most dangerous bears, my three-year-old daughter informs me. I don’t know how she knows what she knows, yet she knows many things. Lately it is all about bears. Electric bears? I ask her. I’ve never seen an electric bear. If you go into his cave, he…
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