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  • Madrigal of Knowledge!

    There are only two things in the world I don’t know. The square root of 77 is 8.972. The capital of             Michigan is Kalamazoo. Most everything is simple if you know where to go. The Internet is a gold mine. The dictionary is good too,             and there are still only two things in…

  • An Old Boyne Fish Barn

    You should have seen the sea in those days, wind smoke and weeping flares washing ashore from the barrios, all those hesitant evacuees, as tarpaulin stretched along Beaufort’s Dyke and our drift nets sailed through the Hebrides. Shuffling in pipe smoke, scribbling a plume of grave longing on the bones of a wax-bright dusk, I…

  • Madrigal of Tears!

    If you add up all the babies floating in space, if you climb to the top of a falling tree, if you drink up all the whiskey             in the Arabian Sea, you will have done something important for the human race, something of nonsense and impossibility.             If you see something disappear without a…

  • Miscellaneous Notes Winter 2010-2011

    Zacharis Award Ploughshares is pleased to present Julia Story with the twentieth annual John C. Zacharis First Book Award for her prose poetry collection Post Moxie: Poems (Sarabande Books, 2010). 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…

  • Memoire

    It seems farfetched, I know, but when we tethered toy horses in the lea of the patio the moon wept like a candle, and the dawn when it came crept along the dusty panhandle. Best not to worry the truth like that yarn about Turner strapped to the mast of the little ice age, better…

  • Shrines

    In Donegal we climbed over a cow gate, crossed through a field among hooded crows and earth smells, climbed a stile and stepped onto rain-mucked ground, to enter a small grotto where a stone St. Columba was surrounded by a yellow cigarette lighter, a key ring with green gremlin, a rain-swollen missal, a toy train,…

  • Tall Boys

    In Leeson Street? we find ourselves in a Georgian chapel of ease,? an elite mass rock, in an Irish lexicon,? in a credo unravelling, in ambivalent government attire, we stand, genuflect, stand again and disperse,? miming handshakes and the bluster of concern. What stains our hands— March as before whipped in a narrow light— as…