Article

Rereading Old Writing

Looking back, the language scribbles. What’s hidden, having been said? Almost everything? Thrilling to think There was a secret there somewhere, A bird singing in the heart’s forest. Two people sitting by a river; Sunlight, shadow, some pretty trees; Death dappling in the flowing water; Beautiful to think about, Romance inscrutable as music. Out of…

The Man in the Common

The day lets go its frozen pose of blue and grey. Snow falls, white on white, wrapping the town in its cocoon. Such calm in snow. The air no longer hungers for each step. My puffs of breath lead me to the Common, its web of stone paths just covered. I scan the scene. No…

The Long Repetitions

Trains in the night. In the morning waves reach beyond water. Animal faces appear at the window muttering cries from the pen. Fences fastened in dirt topple over. Unafraid the woman walks away from the man she loves, the man who does not love her. She is surprised at her own bravery, decides over and…

Contributors’ Notes

MASTHEAD Directors DeWitt Henry Peter O'Malley Coordinating Editor for This Issue Lloyd Schwartz CONTRIBUTORS STEVE ALBERT is a poet and fiction writer from California, now living in Cambridge. FRANK BIDART'S books of poetry are Golden State (Braziller) and The Book of the Body (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). He was the Coordinating Editor of Ploughshares 2/4….

Immediately Upon Landing

my husband looks at me some evenings as if I were about to leave his home. it’s a stolen look one I’ve grown familiar with this last month. it’s there in his eyes over breakfast but more frequently and lingeringly after dinner. he’ll sit in the grey leather chair his legs crossed his flannel trousers…

An Interview with Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney has been at Harvard University teaching two writing courses during the Spring semester. The interview took place in Cambridge, Massachusetts at Michael Mazur's studio with James Randall and Seamus Heaney seated on a couch, tape recorder between them, and Michael Mazur working on sketches of Heaney for a monotype to be used for…

Bodybuilder

He is pulling blood in, trying to be strong in the mirror. The word gives him trouble and he pushes it away, wondering, what will come now? who will come? All his adventures are in his mind. The large muscles serve no one. He dreams of Germany and hopes to be a policeman. He would…

On a Name

Why does a girl love a girl? Why do you still have messages for me? Descending the stairs in the tubercular house every Easter morn      Melanie would come upon a group of Quaker women they glided over in drabs and whispered things to her alone in her father’s barn she would tell me this while…