Nonfiction

Unanimal

       Twenty years old, sparkly makeup on my eyes and cheeks, I wrap a leg over the back of my uncle’s motorcycle, hoist myself onto the cracked vinyl seat.        He’s the cool uncle. The uncle who’s fifteen years older than me, who dates a model, who sips tequila from wide-mouthed glasses in Chelsea bars. Who gives…

Introduction

Looking back at the table of contents of an earlier issue of Ploughshares that I guest-edited some twenty years ago, I was surprised by how few of the writers were then discoveries for me. Two certainly were. Their poems had almost nothing in common: her three poems were straightforward & hard-edged; the details came out…

Missing the Dead

       She’s already fallen twice, first breaking the left hip when she misses a step at the beauty parlor, then her right in a tumble at her old house in Arizona. It’s in this precarious condition that my mother comes back into my life. When her second husband dies, it falls on me, as her only…

Jazz Below the Water Line

Fifty-six years ago I picked up a musical instrument for the first time with intent to commit jazz. It was a trombone left behind by another kid at the jazz record store where we both hung out. (He’d been snatched by Selective Service for the Korean War. I’d 4-F’ed out.) I got a single lesson…

Introduction

I want to send out this issue of Ploughshares in the high spirits of a Saturday morning in late March. I was alone and took a long walk by myself, but I also carried with me this surprising gathering of writers, this sudden congregation of solitaries, some from different countries, a few no longer living….

Introduction

In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a boy turns into a daffodil, a girl turns into a tree, a husband and wife turn into snakes and slither away together. The fisherman Glaucus, seeing the fish he’s just caught return to life after he’s spread them out on the meadow, eats one of the strange leaves they’re lying on…

Introduction

"World is suddener than we fancy it," Louis MacNeice announced in his poem "Snow": "World is crazier and more of it than we think, / Incorrigibly plural . . ." So I felt, collecting the poems and stories for this issue of Ploughshares. The issue was like the great bay window in MacNeice’s poem, with…

Dead of the Night

  For once, no flowers. Past midnight, and very quiet along this corridor. The clock on the opposite wall is round, a cartoon clock. Funny, the idea of keeping time, here of all places. Beneath the clock, a square tablet announces in bold what is now the wrong date, April 3.    I could walk…

Introduction

For me, these past few years have been filled with elegies. Allow me one more: this, not for a loved one, but for the Plough & Stars, the Cambridge pub where this very journal was founded. Like much of the Cambridge that had welcomed (or ignored) me—a young writer who had come to town fifteen…