For the Record
The great sports hero can remember When he thought sex was just for fun. Now he’s desperately affixed to woman number 53,671.
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Once When We Were Lost
There was a prairie of crushed flowers, A prairie that swelled and expired, A prairie of like-it-or-not. Oh but we found it, all of a sudden And straight down below. It was like a mountain as seen from the sky, Like all that sinks and disappears. We wanted to repeat what never happened Or sing…
Iron Path [Eisen-Steig]
Consider history as a cloud or the spread of roots Where nothing is consecutive Except at the moment of singularity, as in when one Walks into the day’s weather, The wind tearing the loose branches, power Lines dipping, and perhaps this is all we could Consider with any validity, for to go beyond this Is…
Elizabeth Graver and Adrian C. Louis, Cohen Awards
Cohen Awards Each year, we honor the best short story and poem 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…
Edward Thomas’s Poem
I I couldn’t make out the minuscule handwriting In the notebook the size of his palm and crinkled Like an origami quim by shell-blast that stopped His pocket watch at death. I couldn’t read the poem. II From where he lay he could hear the skylark’s Skyward exultation, a chaffinch to his left Fidgeting among…
Anonymous Bust of a Man, c. 100 A.D. (Cyprus)
It is hard to remember about the hardening man he is alive, hard not to hear in the shrill nonsense he speaks when he attempts to speak the chirping of a thrush, any ordinary bird hard to see (but look) beneath his sagging mask a face, once flesh, now lost, a planet— barren and featureless…
Reflection
I have one powerful reflection regarding the issue I edited of Ploughshares. A friend, a former student, a poet, an ally in the battle against the Vietnam War, a wiry little Irishman with a great sense of humor, phoned me about that time and asked if I were busy; he was in town and wanted…
Overtime by Joseph Millar
Madeline DeFrees recommends Overtime, poems by Joseph Millar: “Take a sensibility of remarkable delicacy and precision, immerse it in the abrasive, often violent atmosphere of twentieth-century blue-collar America, and what you get is a chronicle of drink, debt, and divorce: a story not unlike that of Raymond Carver. Joseph Millar’s Overtime includes some of the…
Aeon Flux: June
Not sibylline but clear, empty weather; of the eight kinds of sky it was the milk-paled potion most like a cup of coffee she poured past full in such a way as to show herself how good she was, how the liquid lolled just over the white cup’s rim, just so the instant before an…