without sleep without history the first thing without sound without memory of sound Pain thinks of origin’s trespass hoof and cochlea earth without blossom without axis or column the Yangtze without passage the sea without apparition and the animals let loose at Peloponnesus Pain thinks of the first thing without temple water black as burial’s…
The great sports hero can remember When he thought sex was just for fun. Now he’s desperately affixed to woman number 53,671.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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