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…
Placed on the earth for this little moment I wake today to entertain the world. But, Lord, before first light only the clouds my answerer, even to no question, I stare outside, at the black broken universe I cannot see: trees, clouds, birds, stones, fence, grass— all the accouterments of worship on my eyes and…
There, in the same spot as the annihilation of the world, love of existence stood. We walked along. In boulevard windows: plates, hat-like napkins set for the imaginary meal. Each act of revenge has love as a twin but could art convey this without violence? In this parabola, I recalled the little dragon in the…
Stories come to us like new senses a wave and an ash tree were sisters they had been separated since they were children but they went on believing in each other though each was sure that the other must be lost they cherished traits of themselves that they thought of as family resemblances features they…
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