In sunglasses like dark lakes I like the way the car capsules me from conversation, the smell of the day burning. I write home, “Wind through the door is in any house, land from a window a hard pie.” It was a good house. Shutters, soup. One day in the mailbox the face on the…
If I should purchase necktie, hat and cane, spats, and a natural shoulder double breast ed suit, and stroll downtown, would I attain to Class? My heart is sinking in the west. If birds above me, singing to enfilade me top to bottom with sweet tracer fire, lit up my brain's molecular arcade, would meaning…
One morning, as Koslowski awoke, an excellent sentence immediately occured to him which he would not be able to rid himself of until the noon hours. “It was so humid and oppressive, it felt as if the air was running a fever.” A sentence which just about any novelist would surely lust after. In the…
How can I believe that once I lived in the dark pool of my mother, now ashes? Or that these radiant beings my daughters. now mothers, unfolded from me? Or that we all will at last enfold in the body of the earth? I play it over and over but like the atom for the…
O microscopic, ice-capped summit of human eruptions, under the high intensity lamp your ink gleams diamond- like, as though a stone your size were precious individually, whereas we know only en masse is diamond dust useful, e.g. sprayed up onto midnight as constellations, animals, heroes, queens, utensils, about whom outsized stories got told because night…
I last edited an issue of Ploughshares (Vol. 1/4) nearly 12 years ago. It was a pleasure doing it once more and I would be glad to do it again in the future-say, in another 12 years. The emphasis in this issue is on younger / newer poets. In many cases, I chose to accept…
The breakers had dredged a trough along the water's edge, shelved stones, the way they shelve sand and a wader, stepping down, stumbles and sinks to his waist. Each stone was rolled round, colored eggshell, ebony or brick, white as bleached clam or pink quartz ribboned green. She hefted their palm-sized weights as she lay…
This black hole is empty not just of eyes, voice, hands, but of the least stirring in the air. It is a cave so dark and still there is not the slightest flutter of even one bat's wing.
They dally on succulent fields of ferment while days pitch away. Their jaws move in circles like a woman's seasoned fingers delving bins at a rummage sale—both know green's secret outposts in dark corners. And noses stroke the ground, hothouse breath coaxing tubers to curl up another year. They have the privilege of this valley….
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