Welcome to the new Ploughshares website! For answers to commonly asked questions, read here.
The light settles on your face, white crumbs circling your mouth. You sweep it off the lapels and shoulder-straps of the dead you’re dreaming of. You sweep it from the dress you will marry in. You could gather it like dust, add water and make a loaf you’d die from, and having digested your own…
Sunday: broken teacups to replace the brassiere; the old folks have too much to mull over. I guess I’ll cry for them when it seems as though the crying’s good. Monday: old sots in the willows — the dog food will probably last a year, with caution and a fork without tines. Tuesday: break your…
Two clocks out of synch watch faces of night drift by. One face, a lacquered saint, dredged up from a trunk, wrapped in virgin wool, black robes of justice trapped in the vault of a bank. An 18-karat guarantee of stainless steel and peerless dentistry, though you’d have to pry the mouth open to discover…
Your eyes float like sun grains through their light, pollinating the air — with idiots? If they graze and go, the same wind that brought them, blows them away, the same hand. Returning, they will appear as an orange in the sky, the segments as windows, the focus sharper, more acute. In them, I have…
The door slams. The corpse sits up. The dog says, “Don’t look at me.” They have planned this in Hollywood. They have planned your elopment with the boy with silver cufflinks. They have planned his mother’s anger, the snobbishness caught in her teeth, gooey as a night of bile. When you unbutton your blouse —…
When the locks froze I stuffed my hands with rags. My wife’s breasts or small animals work but I don’t use rocks; their edges make me dream fists. Wounds close – look at a chopped tree marry dirt, look at bird’s claws knarl on twigs. I like fingers supple as flames, something to lay on…
Everywhere gutter musicians with rare saxophones rise in the air like snowy egrets. The night wolf drifts on a coffin nailed with stars. A man in an alley unravels the feathers of a woman’s body. From the firmament above the rooftops a hand rockets loose, catching fire in the snow. The one window, steam-laced with…
Outside the barracks of the city & the fountains of the suburbs lit up with private yellow lights, kitchens of self, bedrooms of despair, women in white slips pulling down shades, newspaper blown down airshafts like dead souls. Inside the park trees drip green in the dark, unseen lilac flows, pines zig zag, birches rear…
“You’ve got yore head up yore ass and it’s a good thing you got a cellophane navel to see where yore goin’,” says some dude by the jukebox. Many of us have learned this is not an insult. His vision is crystal clear: one part Roadrunner, two parts locker room hosanna, one part Donna in…
No products in the cart.