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…
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…
If only the nudes weren't so serious, but giggling, like the two little girls holding hands. They ask a woman absorbed by a woman, lit as though from the bottom of a pond, “Who painted the naked lady?” “Titian,” she answers, and the girls, still holding hands, jump up, skip, hooting through the sixteenth century…
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