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….
Beal comes in the night. "Auntie!" he says softly with his lips against the glass. The door is latched. Just a thin latch, not meant to keep out something big. Beal taps the glass with his knuckles. "Auntie! It's me!" Among the hairs of a young boy's beard, pimple scars have been carved, concave as…
To be a boy meant it was only easier to pee in the woods or from a rowboat easier to fit into tight jeans the crooks of trees except for some fat boys and some flat-bellied flat-buttocked girls. To be a boy meant it was always harder to have a beautiful anything: like eyes, handwriting,…
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