Spackling the golden clouds in a fucking frenzy. I wear my hair mad as a rocket scientist that helpless one morning. Ill, doctor says, & she won’t live years. Did you ever run from your own sick heart choking? What the night knows in the myth of its far lightless pit could lay you flat…
When the infant head bursts out, the fire begins to die, shoulders, like displaced rocks, find a place to rest until they are pulled, twisted out into the air to steam, then cool. Everything hisses and smokes as when lava finds ocean. Now there is an After. After it is done. After her first minute….
Miscellaneous Notes—Winter 2008–09 John C. Zacharis Award Ploughshares is pleased to present Susan Hutton with the eighteenth annual John C. Zacharis First Book Award for her poetry collection On the Vanishing of Large Creatures (Carnegie-Mellon, 2007). The $1,500 award, which is named after Emerson College’s former president, honors the best debut book by a Ploughshares writer,…
—ágnes nemes nagy every few minutes, through a metal flue the throat bursts into flames from the furnace above my bed. it’s the color of fire. i can see the chokeholds catch. fire ants carry off the heat down the metal ducts, and the vents push out the heat, which falls down the walls behind…
If it isn’t a disappointment it’s an overwhelming number of coincidences. Because really I don’t need another you another pigeon like you, I will tell them. You are at the same time an embraceable construction and of Kansan descent. Nouns and nouns and metal and nouns and you might suffer the weather but…
The boys’ stories of the tobacco— splotched and yellow “toad” squirting blood from eyes and licking red ants don’t prepare you for a patch of the field rising and rushing blurry, then stopping, fitting earth tightly, the last puzzle piece. Nor do you know how you’re guided to it, and though they’ve told you…
Be it so we were among them. Veins in the fingers that remember, will. Every vacant gaze an arc. Drawn against impassible night. The sky trapezes a decade, one letter hurls after another. Huddles nameless on the grid. Where did the child bright swerve among inky knees. The animals press dumbly forward in a crowd…
For many, gifted writer and giving teacher Jean Valentine has always resided under the radar. Poet/meisterblogger Ron Silliman writes in 2007: "In over a quarter century of visiting New York, where she’s made her home, for readings, talks, conferences, I’ve never—not once—heard a New York poet ever mention her name. For her sense of ‘presence’…
Where will you go? Will there be a nail brush, face cream, a cotton-pressed comb? Will there be toothpicks? Dove soap? A small towel? Will there be a shoe horn? Will you sleep? Will there be others? Will there be a quiet room, a firm bed? Will you lie prone with your hands on…
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