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Some Gangster Pain

Eunice is tired of pain, everyone else's. She wants some gangster pain, to strut her thick ivories in a collision of dreams, the pajamas-to-work dream, the magnolia siege dream. What ya got there. Eunice, say Johnny and the boys. Eunice lives behind the bus, another fleeing place, riot of exhaust. She doesn't have much to…

The Donation

The ten-car Interstate collision has shucked me from the body. My little heat ascends toward space, and now, under the surgery theater lights, they are lifting out my usable parts to be reinstalled, to keep some stranger going awhile. Goodbye, old heart, old greased purple fist. Keep slugging, just one more inevitable rejection. So long,…

Immaculatus

Koslowski belongs to that tiny group of people who came into being through immaculate conception. “Whether in my case too the Holy Spirit had a hand in it, or perhaps even God in Heaven, I just don't know,” Koslowski mentioned to friends. In any case when he was younger and slept with his natural mother…

Alias

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…

A Life of Crime

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…

An Excellent Sentence

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…

Mirage

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…

To the Glistening Center of a Period, On a Page of the Newspaper

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…

Editor’s Note

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…