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…
after Gordon Matta-Clark a house is what gives way the living unframed behind the door (don’t answer) iron bedstead shadowed (here we’d hide to play) never comes around the head so crack the rafter (the hand, the face) tilt it true lay open the beam four corners forced (where you were) undone the bright core…
In the dark field, The question is the same. Desiring to sit and not sit In one place. And write nothing about smoke, Flaring birds with diaphanous wings, A crow’s intent, how slow the elderly Beneath spangled trees—how thoughtful their retreat. One bottomless pot. But I can’t keep Roethke out of my thoughts, Tu Fu…
Chi Chi inhaled the screen from her crack pipe.” I laugh and wait for Leslie to join in, but there is only silence on the other end of the line. “You’re serious?” I ask. “You better believe I’m serious. That child gone and almost killed herself.” I want to apologize for laughing, thinking this was…
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