When I came back from Mexico, I looked like death. My mouth broke down, weather-beaten. I was paying for my sins, my palate had melted. I could touch my brain directly with my tongue. It was painful, terrible, and sweet. While Svetozar was sitting outside, the cabinet of dental instruments was crashing down. I brought…
ANNE ATIK‘s two books of poems are Words in Hock (1974) and Offshore (1991), both from Enitharmon Press. She also authored the memoir How It Was, about her friendship with Samuel Beckett. Other work has appeared in APR, The Partisan Review, Literary Imagination, Pequod, and The Nation, among others. AMY BEEDER‘s first book is Burn…
Old man, why shake a wrinkled prick at the young girls? They scream in harmony, scramble off, and then in mottled light, our eyes meet: you, unbalanced on the hoof of an orthopedic shoe, leaning on a stick, gumming your sly grin back into stubble as with a palsy- humbled hand you try to zip…
Poor white and pining, the full moon coins its antebellum image on a welling tide that rakes the shingle back across the bay. A sight whose sounds summon into mind the muffled ruckus of a million tiny broadcast die caroming off green baize, the bone-clatter by which fate decides the youngest child in a family…
"World is suddener than we fancy it," Louis MacNeice announced in his poem "Snow": "World is crazier and more of it than we think, / Incorrigibly plural . . ." So I felt, collecting the poems and stories for this issue of Ploughshares. The issue was like the great bay window in MacNeice’s poem, with…
My mother, given one name, exchanged it for another—Cohen for Carlan, less “Jewish”— and then for my father’s, whose Edelman had lost its E during the war for “business reasons.” What’s in a name? A Rosenblum without the blum would still a Rosen be. And what about me— Girl who met Goy, and gave away…
You take the fragments of the world and put them into boxes, each one smaller than the last. Lock each one. It’s a kind of violence. The blue triangles of your mother’s dress, or the birds that flew backwards that morning. It was an unremarkable day. Flat weather. Repeating cycles of traffic. There was nothing…
In “At the Fishhouses,” Elizabeth Bishop writes-half-playfully-that she’s “a believer in total immersion.” In “Arrival at Santos,” she exchanges the unsatisfying port city for “driving to the interior.” This descent or expedition to the inner life of things has been one of the continuing qualities of Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry-neither relinquishing the pleasures of the passing…
1 The girl who martyred her dolls, sending them To heaven to wait for her arrival, Sentenced them to stones or fire or the force Of her hands to tear them, methods she’d learned From the serious, dark nuns who taught her. She would press a pillow over my face To encourage sainthood. “Now,” she…
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