Still I am not sure which is most vivid— the love now risen from its previous absence, or the future loss it rides like a shadow, the eye’s after-image of a bright light gone. In any case, with its harrowing blades, this fertile line of love already draws through me a beautiful symmetry: The invisible,…
for Gary Holthaus Seven geese, southwest, and seven flat-black ships, converging in the Colorado sky, before the pale haze of early winter, bright and bronze and empty, on a Sunday just approaching noon. I count the birds again: seven. And the helicopters: seven, in a line northeast, their rotors blurred and sounding faint percussion, high…
Though I’ve lived a life and I have lived amongst men and I have Loved this life as an experiment—an act of science And an act of ruth—I’ve kept for this city my last half heart (I lost the other to the chance of art.) And so, stirred of a loud silence, Slow snow as…
I knew an editor once — alas, an editor whose magazine commanded a good deal of national attention — who hated to publish fiction unless he could be assured that it was “true,” that it “had happened.” Having restricted his interest to the documentary, one must assume his list of approved works could not have…
I’m very worried when I see the boy from my writing workshop, gloomy Chico Lopez, strolling down St. Mary’s Street with Julio, who used to live next door. This looks like a bad connection. They’re talking busily with their heads together, carrying sacks. I’ve never seen Chico look so animated before. Is it just that…
This issue marks a transition for Ploughshares — a small but not insignificant change in editorial policy, one of several that have occurred over twenty-three years of publication. Originally, Ploughshares was edited by a committee of writers who had founded the journal: Harvard graduate students, Irish expatriates, Iowa Workshop refugees, New York School and Bowery…
The fonts in all the churches are dry. I run my fingers through the dusty scallops of marble: not a drop for my hot forehead. The Tuscan July heat is invasive to the body but not to the stone churches that hold onto the dampness of winter, releasing a gray coolness slowly throughout the summer….
His erection startled me. At first, it seemed merely to point me out, acknowledging my part in nothing more than the simple and various human desires in our encounter: the desire to be loved and to be healed, the desire to be naked before another and thus to be understood utterly and to be wordlessly…
They all want me to stop talking to you. My mother with the face of a television blaring answers to the game no one ever guesses— Bill Holden and Deborah Kerr in Bombay making nookie on the graves. The wind cawing senseless to the Blue Moon. Even you are tired of my chatter— Smart girl…
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