As soon as she cleans her tray, she stops By the office, picks up a grocery bag Marked with her name in red crayon And spends the rest of her lunch cleaning Candy wrappers, twigs, leaves, and other trash From the school's scrubby patch Of front lawn. She does this diligently, No complaints, as if…
Lump of vein Rack of lamb, the lame leg— today—a wing apart from the central thing. I find I found and off the ground O O O awful news. I've feathers and no lift.
MASTHEAD Coordinating Editors for This Issue James Alan McPherson DeWitt Henry Executive Director DeWitt Henry Managing Editor / Associate Fiction Editor Don Lee Associate Poetry Editor Joyce Peseroff Assistant Editor David Daniel Office Manager Jessica Dineen Founding Publisher Peter O'Malley Thanks this issue to: Colleen Westbrook; our editorial interns Janet Choi and Lev Grossman; and…
The Pilgrim: Blue plough bones High eye socket Soot rock gristle Be with me Be with me Be with me Never be not with us Fox The Glacier: My gentle coming: fall I am with you my Gold-pan My sieved and sieving brow Most wanted: Favorite: Wanted and needed and loved: Diaspora.
The cage is the only creature alive singing in the yard singing its giant heart out singing its giant heart out for us. We who have been the other's hour, we who have made the minutes accountable, and the seconds lively and saw the big tree lovely, we and our hands slowly fall apart, a…
Take all away from me, but leave me ecstasy. -Emily Dickinson Out of all modesty-and sanity-I would like to think of these poems and stories as approaching the ecstatic state, rather than being expressions of ecstasy. In fact, when I called for work for this issue of Ploughshares, I said I was mostly interested in…
Water Hot green plastic bucket Hole Rabbit in the wall of the ground Bone Rabbit, hip, shoulder Leaf under a leaf of dust On my way to wash, The heavy buzz of flies like bees: There’s a carcass here. Rabbit. Eels Live to be ninety. . . An eel will eat your hand. I smell…
Twilight moves on weightless wrists and runs aground. To strand, to sail along the coast, to coast. When we get there, you want to lie down. To sleep, to spread a blanket across the ground glass of light at the edge. There is moistness under the hair on that nape. Artesian depths of body rise…
We begin with a catalog of all the dead things seen or not seen in the way the eyes turn quickly away and return again furtively (was that a dog or a pile of trash swarming with flies?) The black rat in the stream drowned between two stepping stones the water washing through his coat…
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