There's a train coming down the pike. We were Hilary, Pat, Lori and me. I haven't thought of them since that day in Abergavenny. We'd set out for Wales, Lori and I knapsack-backed. She with the feather in her purple hat. Hilary and Pat came east and tacked through Dublin to meet us at Abergavenny….
A cold Sunday morning in early December. The first snow. All night long the sky hung heavy with a locked-in gathering flood. Then at dawn the first snow came. The first snow. Looking at the sky, Rachel, who lives twenty blocks away, sees at dawn the first snow come, drawing a veil between her house…
1. She sits reading the end of Hans Brinker, and tugs faded flannel over her tucked-up feet so no bit of them can show. She hears him yell “Damn you! You've made us late again, will you—” and her mother, something too soft to hear. She holds her breath; relaxes: nothing falls. When the doorbell…
this is the woman sons look for when they leave their wives —Leslie Ullman Husband Again tonight he sees her eyes burning in the common flame. Windows, too, give him her image at strange times. He begins to breathe like the first daffodils punctuating the April grass. The miles to work he dreams: she rides…
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,…
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