The Stratton Military School for Boys is a quadrangle surrounded by low buildings, surrounded by a stone wall, surrounded by the mountains of north central Pennsylvania. The school is on a hillside above the white clapboard houses of the nearby town. It is a steep slope, the kind where kids might go sledding in winter….
The 1992 Denise and Mel Cohen Awards for the outstanding poem, short story, and nonfiction published in Ploughshares Volume 17 Each of these awards carries a prize of $400 and is made possible through the generosity of Denise and Mel Cohen of New Orleans. The Cohen Awards are nominated and judged by the advisory and…
“Dead Confederate Solder” —Gardner, Catalog #554 Around him is battlefield litter, dew-swollen lumps of a spilled powder. What is it? And the strips of cloth. Left behind the lines of men that advanced or fell farther on or hid somehow on this trampled field of Maryland grass. By chance, at the extreme upper edge of…
for Marie She was in her thirties, a poet, and she was afraid to fly. Her brother was dying in another city. She did not have a husband or children, but she had a job that held her in the city where she lived. Until her brother went home to die, her job was work…
The 1992 Denise and Mel Cohen Awards for the outstanding poem, short story, and nonfiction published in Ploughshares Volume 17 Each of these awards carries a prize of $400 and is made possible through the generosity of Denise and Mel Cohen of New Orleans. The Cohen Awards are nominated and judged by the advisory and…
Off work and going upslope for a look I left the plans—to see the view Their money bought—weighted with a rock, And trampled a path of parted weeds Past pampas, nettles, Poison oak bristling in the breeze, A weathered two-by-four nailed high up in a cedar's fork, A haggard pair of panties waving stiffly from…
1. This bottlebrush tree (a green clash for the sparrows) Struck me to the rock with one hollow eye Of an indented knot The butte had taken the light Which reappeared in winter branches And voltage wires hung at half-mast. All of this being one version of the past. 2. When I'm thinking of the…
Someone asked me once if the world changed whenever I crossed from one language to the other. She said she noticed how my voice changed. I listened to myself: it was the same voice, the same man speaking a strange language. I wondered about my face—if a certain look might be possible only in one…
They make pleasure their first food in the morning, They take their iron wings from under the bed And strap them on in the sun, they grow hotter Than the noon light on the Mission. Afterwards they bathe in snow And dress in feathers of mercury—. Each day is the front of war, With its…
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