Say a calling knocks you out of sleep, draws blood, is accessible only by water. Say you believe you own your life but you have looked away and your absence has already begun. You struggle out patched together by medication and makeup scaling the broken cadence, the frost-heaved lanes, walking papers clenched to your chest….
After I got married and became the stepfather of two children, just before we had two more, I bought it, the bright blue sorrowful car that slowly turned to scratches and the flat black spots of gum in the seats and stains impossible to remove from the floor mats. Never again, I said as our…
Excerpted from his article “Ploughshares: Breaking New Ground in Literary Magazines,” which was published on January 19, 1982, in The Boston Phoenix: My first contact with Ploughshares came in 1974 with Vol. 2/3. The coordinating editor was David Gullette, director of drama at Simmons College and one of the charter members of Ploughshares. Gullette was…
The shadow of a falling bird against a building is more real than the bird. Shadow of a glioblastoma on an MRI is not real at all. It will be short and brutal, the doctor says. She sees the shadow of her head on his shirt, sees a framed photo of the shadow of a…
Any afternoon on the brink of extinction there they were: lolling in the canopy, loud-mouthed with abandon, red-cheeked, eating the topmost leaves. Where the monkey prospered, the Ghana forest now slumps into stillness, the way a dying man suddenly sees something in the distance and gives it his complete and stony attention. I can’t ponder…
All the way home, I kept thinking of the lost finger of St. Teresa, displayed in the gift shop of a convent where she spent most of her life being thrown by the devil down the stairs or gripping the handrail after communion, so others wouldn’t see how it took all of her strength to…
Slate gray lake. Willows in a rough wind. On the far island, where the shoreline is tattered with fallen trees, it is not yet spring. The waves won’t allow it. Won’t allow anyone to land there, let alone to leave. Not today; maybe not for a long time to come. The bramble takes…
This was more like it, looking up to find a burlapped fawn halfway across the iced-over canal, an Irish navvy who’d stood there for an age with his long-tailed shovel or broad griffawn, whichever foot he dug with showing the bandage that saved some wear and tear, though not so much that there …
Johnson, Vermont Yet another metamorphic swimming hole, waterfall where language fails. Gneiss, schist, slate. You can hear nouns meta- morphose to verbs, gnarl, shiver, split, then strip down, tumble in granitic kettle-holes and camouflage themselves in green water, green because pines hang above the fault-line and shade language from blue-blank sky where some- body’s watching,…
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