Editing an issue of Ploughshares turned out to be more mysterious than I expected. I began by taking a few poems and a story that I thought had form and significance. After that, I found myself looking at manuscripts as if they were fragments of something larger — pieces of glass from a crystal ball…
Like an accordion, a plastic, penicillin-green curtain stretched and cordoned off the room, aluminum handles disappearing with a click into the wall. Mrs. Hansen then nodded behind her bifocals as Theresa Mills stood unaspiringly in front of the corkboard, bleeding crucifix, and flag to read out loud the first chapter from our Social Studies text,…
In heartland cafeterias, I hear the resolute chirp of women heaping pale food on white platters, tuna surprise, baby corn niblets, flash-frozen cod, potatoes whipped, ridged, stuffed, mashed, washed down with peach cobblers, coconut pie, sighing under vanilla ice cream in a scoop, and loaves, wafers, snaps, strips, squares, puffs, crullers, cakes, guests at the…
LEARNING OUR LINES: 1952 Mommy is dying. There is a lump growing inside her and it takes all the food. Mommy sleeps alone now and Grandmother sleeps on a cot next to Mommy's bed so she can hear if anything happens or she's needed. Daddy sleeps in my bed and I sleep with Sissy in…
How little they ask of the stale winds of traffic— even of the picked-over plots of dirt, the pyracanthas whose sun-red berries will not reappear for months. And so they range on the crust of faith at the edge of all their days— no fields south to fly to, no other life but this. Dark…
I know the place where her body was found. In a tidepool near the fishing rocks where the children once caught a starfish. They placed the starfish in a pie plate filled with an inch of brine. For days it writhed but so slowly the arms didn't seem to move like hour hands on clocks….
The boat sailing over from the island dock, about to capsize near the harbor buoy, was a splash of red and white paint his father knew would catch the boy's eye. We act from feelings, his father said, and unlike the fine detail of foam lacing the white-capped water, true action lives in the beauty…
Breaking and entering, Walter called what he did the night before, and tipped back the bottle of corn whiskey in the cornfield. This bottle he stole, and some jewelry which he threw in a sump. Sumps, he slurred, where the run-off gathers and levels high by morning. Sometimes they'd find a small kid there belly…
The candle burnt down to a nub of wax cannot be lit. The bulb in the ceiling fixture needs to be changed, everything in this house needs work. She closes the bedroom door to extinguish the hallway light left on for the children's sake. We undress, pants slumped in the chair, a blouse falls to…
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