MASTHEAD Guest Editor Charles Baxter Editor Don Lee Poetry Editor David Daniel Assistant Editor Gregg Rosenblum Associate Fiction Editor Maryanne O'Hara Associate Poetry Editor Susan Conley Founding Editor DeWitt Henry Founding Publisher Peter O'Malley Assistant Fiction Editors: Jay Baron Nicorvo and Nicole Kelley. Editorial Assistants: Bess Newman and Patricia Reed. Fiction Readers: Eson Kim, Wendy…
According to city ordinance, the Buena Gente cantina should have been closed an hour ago. But the proprietress, a charitable soul whose life imitated the generosity of the earth, who believed in the rights of the people, and who didn’t mind defying a silly law in the name of good business, stayed open late because…
A muster of white peacocks preens by the inverted lake pooling the ceiling. The peacocks are mute. He is not quite mute. An inattention. Letters answered in such haste, he fails to answer. Words overlaid, commas sliding out of line—a riff of lost eyelashes punctuating nothing. In this hungry place, there is a bed and…
Editing my second issue of Ploughshares, in my seventy-third year, I look back on a life’s worth of editing. It began in high school, continued at Harvard, then at Oxford. Late in my Oxford time, I took up editing poetry for the new Paris Review, and lasted nine years. I edited or helped to edit…
Asking Carrying a bucket full Of a broken window or Watching people and their mirrors on TV; the woods tamped down By snow and the very high iron of trees; Air passes from purple to blue into Black pitched lower than trees; Glass for this Half-week….
What’s it all about? Don’t ask and then you’ll know.
“. . . most desires end up in stinking ponds . . .” —Auden The water, if you can call it that, is black as tar, and the lily pads are seared at the edges, curling up as if trying not to touch it more than they have to. The lilies themselves have gone to…
Last week my head was too small. This week, it is too big. My face in the mirror is a picture of dismay. If I try to correct the disproportion with baggy clothes, I will look not only moonheaded but squat, Charlie Brown-esque. When the head is too small, I fare no better: tight clothes…
On freezing winter nights, the boys had two chores before going to sleep. They had to tie the blankets down to the bed frames so that they would not toss their covers off in their dreams and get frostbite on their hands and feet. And they had to empty their chamber pot so that what…
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