The east coast was west for us, and cold. For sore throats my mother made egg-lemon soup, her face misting over the big pot as it boiled another sea, the oar-shaped ladle lost in steam. Now the yellow lamb broth twirls open like a sunflower when I say “avgo-lemono.” The language breaks on this little…
Cottage in which quiet persuades me I am the only one who has made myself useful, like God beginning to eat his young: One by one like poisoned mice the years smell in the wall. Hell's Peeping Tom with his ruddy face takes a closer look in the hole. At dawn and at dusk, a…
How was it that Myott came to understand the nature of his hands? It happened like this. Even as a child he was, by temperament, a shy, gentle boy, quiet and self-contained, one not given to coveting the marginal compensations offered by an increasingly noisy and unprincipled world. His mother, who managed a religious bookstore…
My students, pink as Barbie Dolls, Clean as the coins they slip Into arcade games at the mall, Live in tenements of ignorance. Headlines are meant for someone Else's worry, like taxes Or insurance on the Camaro Which Dad sees to. When it comes To Winnies, they don't know Mandela From Pooh. In the film,…
MASTHEAD Directors DeWitt Henry Peter O'Malley Coordinating Editors for This Issue Madeline DeFrees Tess Gallagher Managing Editor Jennifer Rose Thanks this issue to: Don Lee, Tracey McIntire, Cynthia May, Therese Mageau, Elizabeth Alexander, Randi Schalet, Anne Friedman, Madeleine Beckman, Carol Feingold, Doina Iliescu, Ellen Hinsey, Marcy Hinand, Steve Dykes, Mariette Lippo, Joe Linitz, Melissa Green,…
Loosely bound and buttoned on a pole, clothed in the gardener's cottons, the scarecrow stretches as if to feign sleepiness, and sparrows spurt from the garden, beyond his sleeves. He swells, and soft green light invades the narrow rib, a space to fit a life in, but the breeze drops. It seems he needs only…
Your coffin was pine, a simple fact. Gravediggers in overalls brought sturdy shovels, worn with use and we stepped forward one by one: Heft of the handle in my hand. A spadeful of earth. On my last letter to the hospital I printed crazily, please forward. I told myself you might be going home, knew…
The original intention of editing an issue of Ploughshares was a collection of dramatic verse, either written directly for theatrical performance or adaptable for the stage. There were few submissions. Instead, resolutely lyrical poems came, altering intention. There are many names I would have liked to see here, but the pleasures of discovery of new…
On a dawn walk I startled a great horned owl, wary, near, on a low limb of a tree downhill from me. Those slow wings opened, broad as a man, two men, and he sank fast down into the hillside in blank silence, a wall toppling its whole enormous length that does not touch a…
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