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You’re dew on

I’ve set my mind on You who don’t set your mind on earthly things what have you become now You’re here and I’ve a mind to You who set like an angel cake strawberries that I’m sure for that I hope for when You set your mind on you’re sure sweet what I’ve become now…

A Few Questions

Will I always love you for throwing that skate out of Alan’s boat? Last summer, out lobstering in his Black Fin off Gay Head, only four bloody bluefish left for bait and five more traps to fill, we begged for its life. Did I know then I would leave you after fourteen years? Playfully patriarchal,…

Fly you do

my little bird don’t worry bout money she don’t worry little bird for worry don’t add up but a bunch of empty seeds no your single moment is now You long lovely thing your every moment is long and today and also yesterday when meek and lowly the whole world belonged to you You longing…

Calf

Born with everything but breath He slid into the world a month too soon.   The trees traced with snow, the farm white-roofed, Even the tractor buried useless.   The far mountains gullied white, Lost under an avalanche of cloud.   And the calf nothing more than a flow of soft water, Eyes thin against…

Window on the Cape

Boats in the front yard! Blue tarps enduring the stare of the winter sun hollow as clouds that have been emptied everywhere. Air flowing in defiance of Heraclitus, that you can breathe twice, and lose shingles from any direction. Bottles in the window sparkle with the names of defunct institutions and entrepreneurs. Purple and green…

Light Bearer

I felt it when they hammered out these feet and carved     the flesh between these long toes of mine and when they rubbed narrow the stalks of my legs     into calves and thighs—yes then and when they shaped my groin outward instead of in     and rounded my ass same as everyone’s yes—then…

Monologue of the Last Fear

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…

Volcano

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….

Postscripts: John C. Zacharis Award Winner Susan Hutton

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,…