Night sweats to the rattle and clink of their armor— marching grooves around my bed, pulling toothpicks from tatami to disembowel each other, or skewer and roast a beetle, fine bone china of their sake cups rolling the sound of marbles when they drop them on the hard- wood floors at dawn. You think I’m…
More Awards Our congratulations to the following writers, whose work has been selected for the following anthologies: Best Stories — Four stories from Ploughshares-a record number from a literary journal-will be among the twenty in The Best American Short Stories 2001: Claire Davis’s “Labors of the Heart,” from the Spring 2000 issue edited by Paul…
Call me What You Will. This for your complicated hands— my best mechanical tree. Test? No thank you. Question? The rivers run in circles. You noticed. We noticed. (thinking) Duet! & the pin factory . . . Sweet extrovert, it is making pins. You will, you know, but I shouldn’t sing Introvert! Introvert! if I…
Watermelon, not pomegranate, is the fruit of the dead. I eat it for breakfast these hot midsummer days to feel my spellbound mouth crunch the cool flesh, so many seeds to tease out with the tip of my tongue and spit onto my plate with a small clatter. The dead thirst for…
My name in the black air, called out in the early morning. A premonition dreamed: waking, I beheld a future of mourning. Our partings were rehearsals for the final scene: you and I in a desert, saying goodbye on a white September morning. The call came. West, I flew west again. Impossible, but the sun…
There’s joy for the well-turned shinbone, praise for the wrought torso, we were warned when he opened those gray eyes. What gifts we gave we gave for virtues—a white stone castle to teach him courage, small guns to set the blood. A storybook, illuminated, kept him close, hard against the fire. He…
During the early years of Ploughshares, from about 1971 to 1974, a group of us, an informal literary board, met at Joanne’s and my living room on Harvard Street in Cambridge. The people I remember were David Gullette of Simmons, the poet Paul Hannigan, Katha Pollitt, George Kimball of the Phoenix, Peter O’Malley, one of…
Drink your cod-liver oil or the moon will eat you, my grandmother used to say. Well, I didn’t drink my cod-liver oil and the moon didn’t eat me. But one night I refused to drink my milk when I was visiting my grandmother, who lived in a white-frame farmhouse on the outskirts of Bloomington, and…
We died one by one, each plumper than the mirror saw us. We exited obligingly, rattling key chains and cocktail jewelry, rehearsing our ghostly encores. Glad to be rid of pin curls and prayers, bunions burning between ironed sheets—we sang our laments, praised God and went our way quietly, were mourned in satin and chrysanthemums,…
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