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  • Fox Glacier

    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 Fly-Cage

    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…

  • Approaching the Ecstatic

    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…

  • Bowl of Dreams

    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…

  • De-Exoticizing the Other

    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…

  • All Night

    All their sons are gone and my parents sit in their mountaintop kitchen. Language comes and goes like a far-off sound fading with a breeze. One cannot say “speak” and speak. A ground hog finds their cucumbers. In the valley fire finds a building. They call the smoke a scarf. But they know better. On…

  • Rue Replique

    The light wouldn't go away and he kept on walking In the sort of French a baby speaks Sometimes he forced himself to be spoken to sometimes not A woman dressed as a pre-teen may have asked a question They shuffled on the ocean floor in gentle parallel streams      opposed But not mixing cool salt…