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Apiary XV

To live without memory is to have each hour as a pane of air for canvas and the view from a window to paint: amber-honey cold mornings: humbled by evening:: variation and variation of ambiguous figments—ziggurat beehive auroras—flicker and go out. All history may as well be in these brushstrokes: the hand has not rested…

Postscripts: John C. Zacharis Award Winner Ander Monson

John C. Zacharis Award Ploughshares is pleased to present Ander Monson with the seventeenth annual John C. Zacharis First Book Award for his story collection Other Electricities (Sarabande, 2005). The $1,500 award, which is named after Emerson College’s former president, honors the best debut book by a Ploughshares writer, alternating annually between poetry and fiction….

The Husband

When he is deep inside me suddenly I see what he is doing: he is like a man in a tunnel clay walls moist, tracks gliding into the distance he carries a weak flashlight peers forward What is he doing? Is he afraid of snakes? No, he is seeking the other man the rival, the…

Beauty

He entered the sty, and she cringed. She’d always Remember him, a beast with black hair And blue eyes, a young German, and the sound Of screeching ducks and gunshots in the barnyard Where treacherous neighbors had gossiped Away the good frightened family who’d stashed her And hers like livestock with souls, butchered then Or…

Contributors’ Notes

rick barot‘s second volume of poems, Want, will be published by Sarabande Books this spring. He teaches at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington, and in the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.   christian barter‘s first collection of poetry, The Singers I Prefer (CavanKerry) was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Prize. His…

Dylan Thomas

Scawmy, gray-souled November blinds the whale-road, pall draper over this ship bearing one whose name means of the ocean in a language he denied allegiance to, though his lines rang with cynghanedd—English reined by Celtic music, stitched tight as the coracle that wombed Taliesin—tribal rain-downs of sound, not enough: a small people lose their tongue…

Family Dollar

The New Choice Pregnancy Testing Kits are hung along the ramp-up to the register. The woman ahead of me would pass hers with flying colors. She’s huge and sighing, the kids in her cart keep eying my candy. I recognize the cashier—she’s the girl who used to work at the Video Cave that closed. We…

Roustabout

I was twenty-two, pretty maybe. It was a small town county fair: hot dogs, freak show, cotton candy, and heavy wheels laden with light, all tuned to the gaudy air. The Octopus—remember that one? Eight arms like extended girders, the thing was a metal Shiva juggling worlds: a cup spun at the end of each…