MASTHEAD Coordinating Editor for This Issue Marilyn Hacker Executive Director DeWitt Henry Managing Editor / Associate Fiction Editor Don Lee Poetry Editor for This Issue Jennifer Rose Associate Poetry Editor Joyce Peseroff Assistant Editor David Daniel Editorial Assistant Elizabeth Detwiler Copy Editor Kathleen Anderson Founding Publisher Peter O'Malley Thanks this issue to: Colleen Westbrook, our…
1. The upraised arm, first clenched, ready to hit, fist clenched and cocked, ready to throw a brick, a rock, a Coke bottle. When you see this on TV, robbers and cops, or people in some foreign alley, is the rock in your hand? Do you shift and dodge? Do you watch the story twitch…
She carries the garden tools to the hill And starts to beat a hole She finds a garland of roses Full of ears and salvage A shield bush A crown of peas and a glass of juice She has to drink that first Crown the girl! Crown the two of us heart and right arm…
We have long admired Ploughshares — not only for its eclecticism, which has proven an energizing force in contemporary American letters, but also for its nineteen-year history of consistently excellent poems, stories and essays. That’s why we gladly agreed to edit this issue. Once the prospect of filling two hundred pages loomed large, however, we…
Il temporal foco e l'eterno veduto hai, figlio, e sei venuto in parte dov’ io per me più oltre non discerno. —Purgatorio, XXVII, 127 When a mind goes, how much we never knew goes with it. Always singular, the self in its familiar guises moves among us, breaking bread, spending a Sunday on the Battenkill,…
I lift my hands to my face my hand's the biggest thing around and filled with rivers it has stems I can see through to the dark fuzzy air I hold my hand to my face and down below I feel my legs curl up to my chest I look out at the door of…
Distance doesn't matter. Not dreams of home or morning filtered through a darker pane or the timbre of his voice in every room or blaming every cruelty on the place or letters no longer expected, unreceived or pigeons streaming bloodless through the sky. Only this wafer of unbending light redeemed a song by all the…
Twenty-one turkeys amaze our eyes, come traveling north from the Berkshire Museum (Art and Natural History). It says there boa constrictors do not harm humans. False Laocoön! not to mention Eden. On Route 7 nobody stops; but if they had a gun (or a camera in Yellowstone) they'd stop to shoot the hideous buffalo. Turkeys…
Then. No. Now. A long silk scarf of voice, pulled through the loop of throat— Jo Stafford singing on the radio. He wants so much to hear a voice like that, and it exists, as simply as creation, the way the world provides an image for the feeling that's richer than the feeling, so that…
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