Alvin Boudreaux had outlived his neighbors. His asbestos-siding house was part of a tiny subdivision built in the 1950’s, when everybody had children, a single-lane driveway, a rotating TV antenna, and a picnic table out back. Nowadays he sat on his little porch and watched the next wave of families occupy the neighborhood, each taking…
Maxine Kumin, Telling the Barn Swallow, essays edited by Emily Grosholz: Lively analyses by twelve fellow poets of Kumin’s diction and prosody, her literary forebears, and characteristic thematic patterns. Also included here are provocative poems, some published here for the first time, to or about Maxine Kumin. (New England)
Not Jack, but Jackie was the member of that 1950’s wedding entourage who mattered to my mother, Jackie, spoken plainly and in the intimate voice, who had that je ne sais quoi, that savoir faire, that swell sense of style, that wide and lovely face. So broad it bordered on the beautiful. And skirting the…
All week the heat has been killing. Foolish to walk the distance to the credit union even so early in the morning, imagining you can beat the worst of it. Think of the walk back, the pavement baking, not a tree for blocks. Foolish-aKenneth word. Don’t be foolish, Marilyn, take the Volvo. This, as so…
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…
In our father’s schoolteacher’s hand, on the margins of recovered snapshots, nineteen forty-three and forty-four, the World War murderous still, incinerating people in cities, alien, remote, unknown, opposed to us (“And when you’ve killed enough they stop fighting,” said LeMay), yet here with Aunt Gert and Uncle Irv in Williamsport, Pa., American peace in the…
I am not ashamed to admit that I like being held with my back to her-her hands on my stomach, arms arrowing down my hips, fingers tracing the slightest underside of my jeans. I am not ashamed to admit that the absence of a face, the surprise of not being able to see, to predict…
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…
The gods in heavy squabble make the poet choose which is greater, poetry or sex Choose poetry, you are rewarded with a winged horse you cannot dismount, choose sex, you are rewarded with sexual fulfillment with a mannequin of Celotex, frigid, stupid, stiff and thin, choose poetry, you are rewarded with wings of your own…
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