When the seaweed’s bladders swoon and the tide batters and tears at them, sending the bladder wrack to toss with the seal’s gross afterbirth, I say, Bladder wrack, if the sea cares and is good, why should the sea slap you to rocks, leave you in thirst, come to slap again, forty days, forty thousand…
He goes out the door as someone I don’t know. Not the boy-man I was at 17 but somewhat lagging behind, somewhat further ahead, dressed carefully for others in red and black, his body a deliberate mystery. No idea what he knows, what he says, what he does. I’m not supposed to know, only the…
Mistgreen maple leaves just twenty feet from my looking, my remembering an equally soft morning in Monterosso, woman with left hand in sea, right hand cupping a baby’s head to breast, how feminine it seems, the support, this mist rounding sharpness from bird chatter, this wombing of fence, of farm, of distance inviting me to…
May replace passport photos. Often the subject is at rest, Isolated from a group, or otherwise Imagined as an individual More than the sum of a series of quirks (“Reality effects”) The poems generally are forced To jettison run-of-the-mill data The ideal such description Will give you a sense Of how someone’s eyes flash When…
He couldn’t wait to finish a film before he started the next, forty-three total plus the nine-hundred-thirty-minute tv series; refused to commit to any one lover, man or woman; fucked his actors in Munich hotels and Morocco châteaus; left a trail of broken hearts, one ex-wife, four wrecked Lamborghinis, two suicides; popped pills to stay…
There’s something casual about maple leaves. They’re almost mittens, in the first place. They refuse to stand for the national anthem. And when it rains, as it rained last night, a rain I listened to on the floor, a rain as delicate as a shoplifter, they’re moved by each raindrop and resist each raindrop, creating…
Ploughshares is pleased to present Paul Yoon with the nineteenth annual John C. Zacharis First Book Award for his short story collection Once the Shore: Stories (Sarabande Books, 2009). 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….
Psychic rib soaped clean, skeleton key to every lock in this house. Heartless, this place, as I’ve come to christen it. The wish then abandoned in the soap dish, near the wet bone china. Last Christmas saw us shivering at Lake Erie, stroking the battered nose of a dinghy. Abandoned. Bone- clean, its hull scoured…
One moment you were tossing me a football in the empty field behind your house and the next I was getting clobbered by a linebacker and run over by a safety. Forty years vanished in that instant when the pigskin touched my hands, which are still soft, and the defensive end straightened me out with…
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