Article

  • Reflection

    When I edited my issue so many years ago, featuring Amherst poets, I knew I wanted to have Saint Emily preside over our doings. So I got Jerry Liebling, then teaching at Hampshire, and a very distinguished photographer with many awards and shows at places like the Guggenheim in New York, to agree to take…

  • My Fathers, The Baltic

    Along the strand stones, busted shells, wood scraps, bottle tops, dimpled and stainless beer cans. Something began here a century ago, a nameless disaster, perhaps a voyage to the lost continent where I was born. Now the cold winds of March dimple the gray, incoming waves. I kneel on the wet earth looking for a…

  • Contributors’ Notes

    MASTHEAD Guest Editor Heather McHugh 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: Thomas Fabian and Michele Stella. Poetry Readers: Sean Singer, Ellen…

  • Okay, Let’s Not Have Sex

    And who could play it well enough If deaf and dumb and blind with love? —Yeats Let’s not pretend we could be less complicated than millions before us. Let’s be just friends, be Platonic, only look at the bottoms of each other’s feet, or skin on inner forearms, where the sun has done almost no…

  • Reflection

    DeWitt Henry (without whom there would be no Ploughshares) running the magazine out of his Brookline Street, Cambridge, apartment, a book-crammed fifth-floor walkup, and later from a storefront next to a pizza shop on Waverley Avenue, Watertown: DeWitt, who kept the faith and wrote the grant proposals and answered the mail and talked endlessly of…

  • The Beauties of Nature

    She’d grown tired, she admitted, of the picturesque— pretty pipers piped against a backdrape of pineapple yellow. She closed her eyes to it and it went away. In this sight heaven she trilled her right hand in the water-lilied water and wondered at the weather. Twenty starlings twittered. The day had been dieted down to…

  • New Year’s Eve

    Bare trees in front of brown buildings. A pale dry wreath. The bright red ribbon hanging and broken stands for all this century’s cruelty. The street is quiet. Mammoth fog spreads along the ground. The ribbon should be enormous, the road should be made of ribbon, the trees swathed, the babies swaddled. Men should open…

  • Prolepsis in Arrears

    From a spoon to a city —Ernesto N. Rogers, designer, 1900–1969 In the useless pages of Domus, the trade journal of utilitarian interiors, no one’s friend sits on foam, having postconsumption microevents in series, in unsudden red contexts, in the crook of luxury. The dial was big and lobotomy-white wardrobe doors, blaring like mimes in…