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,…
When Paul Loy was ten years old, watching the movers unload the Allied Van Lines truck at his family’s new house in upstate New York, all the white kids on Ableman Avenue materialized. When his parents told him he’d have to learn to get along, even though he didn’t understand the concept of passing, that…
This subway map reminds me of the colored stripes on hospital floors that guide us to recovery or dead ends (I lift my glass to the Amber line), or the spacious room that overlooks a beautiful parking lot where the roofs of the cars are like tiles you’ll be walking on in the same sunshine,…
Old woman on the rocks you look so happy. I’ve been dying to tell someone I have no past but we share no common lexis for that. And anyway you don’t need to know more— everyone is eager to be empty. This is a nice breeze so let’s just sit here a while growing fonder…
a novel excerpt Well OK, let’s see: start with the climactic moment and my father wearing his regulation State Trooper iridescent mirror shades so I could see a pair of shrunken images of myself but not his eyes and he stood there in the marl-paved parking lot beside his truck with the red light still…
This is how the day begins: Badly. Bleary and bloated and many other b-words. There’s vomit on the blanket and he’s not sure whose. Maybe the dog, Barkley? A bottle on the nightstand, a butt in the tray with a dead two-inch ash. The boiler is broken again, the shower bitterly cold. The driveway? Blocked—call…
He’s made me smaller, taken fingernails and spoken words that leave me awake on the outskirts of this town where plum trees don’t give and dogs, chained to their houses with rope, are shot through with silver. His sisters battered down the door with a hatchet and a telescope they bought at a yard sale….
No products in the cart.