“True singing is a different breath.” from Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus I lift the dark blotter to the world and walk under. There is a coolness here I wouldn’t have expected to be such relief. Everything is at stake. A mirage of my life as I want it to be, whole and breathing, fills…
"To be taken in everywhere is to see the inside of everything. It is the hospitality of circumstance." —G. K. Chesterton Before the Flood, before the Hurricane, before the Twin Towers crumpled to dust and the glaciers thawed and the world picked up its heretofore plodding pace toward Doom…before BlackBerries, before iPods, before that…
the green road is long and deep into the mountain eventually it meets the blue sea you are the feet that deep independently I wish I could show you the way I the rich blue bells and ringing the glass stretched out with your father, the sea but the green road longs for you independent…
BETTY ADCOCK is the author of five books of poems, most recently Intervale: New and Selected Poems, finalist for the Lenore Marshall Prize and co-winner (with Caroline Kizer) of the 2003 Poets’ Prize. Adcock has won two Pushcart Prizes, in addition to the North Carolina’s Governor’s Medal for Literature and the Texas Institute of Letters…
RYAN BERG, a graduate of The New School, received an M.F.A. in Creative Nonfiction from Hunter College in 2008. He received a 2008 artist residency at the MacDowell Colony, and is currently working on a memoir about the two years he spent working with gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender youth living in foster care in…
i. Old gold stars & a basket full of spinning eggs. I have been lit by handless fire: I surrender. ii. A sliver cricket chirps Luna! Luna! quickening yellow eyelids of awe. iii. Whose milky nipple nurses a galaxy? Whose changeable face peers over a cradle? iv. Crone who never dies…
The footsteps are unanimous, an urgent ovation which I took as the most wrong moment to show myself. If compassion struck the hull to pull us down, who could show compassion then to one such as myself? But eventually the storm moved on, silence proclaimed the shipmen gone and I lay on my back in…
Running throughout this issue, though not by editorial design, is that typically postmodern sense of absence, in so many configurations: in the memoir, for instance, as loss; or in fiction, as the absence of fulfilled desire, the basic plot of a story being that someone wants something and has problems getting it; or in poetry,…
Cohen Awards Each year, we honor the best poem and short story published in Ploughshares with the Cohen Awards, which are wholly sponsored by our longtime patrons Denise and Mel Cohen. Finalists are nominated by staff editors, and the winners—each of whom receives a cash prize of $600—are selected by our advisory editors. The 2008…
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