Welcome to the new Ploughshares website! For answers to commonly asked questions, read here.
Where would I be if not for your wild heart? I ask this not from love, but selfishly— How could I live? How could I make my art? Questions I wouldn’t ask if I was smart. Take the whole thing on faith. Blind eyes can see where I would be if not for your wild…
I loved one person do you see the evergreen there in fog one by one I was taught to withdraw first from him do you want to know how the mind works under extreme cold ice forming on the eyelid or wind thrown at me I felt every needle felt every breath…
There are nights I dream of goldfish and in my dreams they sing to me in fluted, piercing sopranos like the Vienna Boys’ Choir. Although in the daylight they are mostly silent and ravenous— the suction-cup grip of their mouths on my fingertip like tiny rubber bath- room plungers when they rise to strike at…
The shadow of a falling bird against a building is more real than the bird. Shadow of a glioblastoma on an MRI is not real at all. It will be short and brutal, the doctor says. She sees the shadow of her head on his shirt, sees a framed photo of the shadow of a…
Those beads of lapis, even the classical Blues of dawn, are dimmed by comparison. When I hand you this bunch of cornflowers The only other color in the room Illumines your eyes as you arrange them. They are the blue reflection of whatever Moves in you, serene as cool water tipped Into crystal, oddly enough…
Slate gray lake. Willows in a rough wind. On the far island, where the shoreline is tattered with fallen trees, it is not yet spring. The waves won’t allow it. Won’t allow anyone to land there, let alone to leave. Not today; maybe not for a long time to come. The bramble takes…
His beautiful daughter was attending church. He sat with tea and limp tortilla chips watching the rain. Not feeling left in the lurch by things, but wondering at the odd ellipse. Surely she wasn’t enamored of the pale Galilean on the shore; —apocalypse yet further from her mind. She could inhale the fumes of fellowship…
Whoever said that I should count on mind? Think it through, think it up—now that I know so much, what’s left to think is the unthinkable. And the will has grown too tired to stamp its foot. It sings a vapid song, it dithers and mopes, it takes its basket to the marketplace, like a…
All the way home, I kept thinking of the lost finger of St. Teresa, displayed in the gift shop of a convent where she spent most of her life being thrown by the devil down the stairs or gripping the handrail after communion, so others wouldn’t see how it took all of her strength to…
No products in the cart.