Ploughshares back issues from December 1994:
White noise at midnight. (poem) (Regrets Only)
Dec 22, 1994; ... They all want me to stop talking to you. My mother with the face of a television blaring answers to the game no one ever guesses-- Bill Holden and Deborah Kerr in Bombay making nookie on the graves. The wind cawing senseless to the Blue Moon.Even you are tired of my chatter--Smart ...
Departure. (poem) (Regrets Only)
Dec 22, 1994; ... Thousands of tiny fists tamping the surface of the lake flowing like a wide river gone crazy, southeast, westnorth letting the wind push it around in its bed and the boat hull hugging the shore. What else can she do? Even the trees agree, shaking their crowns, throwing down their leaves as ...
Armistice. (poem) (Regrets Only)
Dec 22, 1994; ... Not far from San Diegosteel ship containers packed with jeeps sit unopenedand someone I know very well stands on the boulevard, surrounded by the pink and white stucco walls outside my windowsuspended in this moment between breathing out and ...
Where the long, lazy mothers stroll. (poem) (Regrets Only)
Dec 22, 1994; ... with their children running ahead, the shore is as messy as any other grassy edge where birds nest, rock spotted, blotched by gulls, geese, and gadwalls.Into the flocks, unexpected outburst of a hundred startled teal, wingtips all together, thrumming the air this close! Almost to ...
Gertrude's ear. (poem) (Regrets Only)
Dec 22, 1994; ... A sow rooting around in a garden uncovered a silk purse. "Oh Good Heavens!" she squealed in horror. "That's Gertrude's ear!" Another sow trotted over, and stared at the soiled ...
A dry wake for Ex. (poem) (Regrets Only)
Dec 22, 1994; ... Mummified by gauzy July heat, my escape into the library's neutral cool brings me to the dog-eared, thumbed-through news: "His failure was his greatest success," says "Milestones" in Time magazine: "Died--Frederick Exley."And then this prick of a hurt born of the aforementioned ...
The oysters. (short story) (Regrets Only)
Dec 22, 1994; ... Pat Boone--not the Pat Boone but only a graduate student in agricultural Science--was driving the oysters down to Mulberry to have them irradiated. He was used to being the wrong Pat Boone but was nevertheless miserable, careening down Interstate 75 in the windless predawn, gripping the ...
The whispering campaign. (poem) (Regrets Only)
Dec 22, 1994; ... Hazy Friday afternoon, traffic slugs. I get off a strange exit miles before mine hoping for the shortcut home. Between tenements, the sun's intuition peeks through a pink bowling shirt on a clothesline.I project the night. After a shower, my evening peck--the click of plastic ...
Original sin. (poem) (Regrets Only)
Dec 22, 1994; ... My mother waited till now to hand down this gold razor her father let slip in the washbowl. In a hurry to teamster the horses, soap in his earlobe and nostril, he climbed into the fire wagon. When she poured the wash water onto pebbles, hard gold sluiced at the bottom with the whiskers. A ...
The talking cure. (poem) (Regrets Only)
Dec 22, 1994; ... He had done what he promised himself he would do-- Kept his mouth shut in the bar--but now driving The miles to her house he felt the talk rising Inside him like ardor, the heat of self-love. But he swore to himself that tonight he would talk Mostly with his shoulders and eyes, let his best ...
So I guess you know what I told him. (short story) (Regrets Only)
Dec 22, 1994; ... Floyd Beefus was picking a tick off one of the springers when the gas man slipped on a cracked dinner plate on the cellar stairs and went bump, bump, bump, right to the bottom. "Yow!" went the gas man. The springer jumped but Floyd kept gripping him tight between his knees until he had ...
Fat Tuesday. (poem) (Regrets Only)
Dec 22, 1994; ... I sit on the porch tonight, smoking my last cigarette, savoring it the way a crow at the edge of the highway feeds until the last second, hopping a little dance on the carcass. The trees are stark, the branches hover, ready to sprout in this warm feast of air. I would like to feast with good ...
A different kind of birth. (poem) (Regrets Only)
Dec 22, 1994; ... --from the Inuit tale The Man Who Was a MotherA man and a woman couldn't have any children. No one knew whose fault it was. This couple was unhappy and the butt of jokes. The man sucked on his wife's breasts. The woman cradled her husband in her arms. But pretending about babies ...
Grief. (poem) (Regrets Only)
Dec 22, 1994; ... I am ashamed as I try to sleep, counting the wounded and the dead in this old day's news,the grieving ones they leave behind. Counting stones and bullets, averted needs, the pretty breaths of my family beside me, counting on a world that I don't trust to keep my children safe. ...
Beholden. (poem) (Regrets Only)
Dec 22, 1994; ... Still I am not sure which is most vivid-- the love now risen from its previous absence, or the future loss it rides like a shadow, the eye's after-image of a bright light gone. In any case, with its harrowing blades, this fertile line of love already draws through me a beautiful symmetry: ...
The swim team. (poem) (Regrets Only)
Dec 22, 1994; ... The elevator is full of the swim team. The swim team knowsHow many goldfish Will fit in a phone booth.The window and its attendant shadows Are not wise. They are an insultTo the swim team, Which has God on its side.The swim team knows How to pull a ...
The names of flowers and girls. (short story) (Regrets Only)
Dec 22, 1994; ... At the time of Babette, my grandfather was not yet twenty. Although today, and perhaps even then, such youth is not necessarily married to innocence, in his case it was. There were boys his age who had already served in the war and returned, but he was not among them for the unromantic ...
Real life #2: scraps. (poem) (Regrets Only)
Dec 22, 1994; ... Althea kept a list of the things she could live without--perfumed clean rugs, cats. It was a long list. She added to it from scraps she wrote on when she thought of them. Every fortnight or so she gathered up the scraps and in her ancient and exquisite longhand added them to her bound ...
The spindle turns on the knees of necessity. (poem) (Regrets Only)
Dec 22, 1994; ... The cold call of the cold to the cold Follows itself to the moon, To the edge of the storm, to the fold in the fold In the shrouds of the fallen-too-soon. The call of the cold to the never-held, The sung-over, the one-by-one Follows the moon to the world where the world Pulls ...
What one would see if one did not. (poem) (Regrets Only)
Dec 22, 1994; ... A chair, A nuthatch on the trunk of a walnut tree, The bloated belly of a dead deer, A man of seventy Grunting at toenails he struggles to pare. A woman In a straw hat over straw-textured hair Kneeling in a garden ....
This morally neutralized domain if intercourse. (poem) (Regrets Only)
Dec 22, 1994; ... The man with the crooked dick strikes a match. The woman with one arm breaks into flame. The man finds a bird's skull and wants to play catch. The woman hears the skull calling her name. He looks out the window. She looks in the door. He crushes a spider onto the pane. Her sun is the ...
Jet. (poem) (Regrets Only)
Dec 22, 1994; ... Sometimes I wish that I was still out on the back porch, drinking jet fuel with the boys, getting louder and louder as the empty cans drop out of our paws like booster rockets falling back to earthand we soar up into the summer stars. Summer. The big sky river rushes overhead, ...
Self-improvement. (poem) (Regrets Only)
Dec 22, 1994; ... Just before she flew off like a swan to her wealthy parents' summer home, Bruce's college girlfriend asked him to improve his expertise at oral sex, and offered him some technical advice:use nothing but his tongue tip to flick the light switch in his room on and off a hundred times ...
Flush. (poem) (Regrets Only)
Dec 22, 1994; ... Not sure what to leave in, I begin with Jenny, her sister and me at the anchor of our great mall, Sears: We stuff cassettes down her crooked spine's brace, and stroll through our mother's aisle (lifting douches), into the store ladies' room where we fill the drooping bags at taps that keep ...
Birthmates. (short story) (Regrets Only)
Dec 22, 1994; ... This was what responsibility meant in a dinosaur industry, toward the end of yet another quarter of bad-to-worse news: You called the travel agent back, and even though there was indeed an economy room in the hotel where the conference was being held, a room overlooking the cooling towers, ...
Brazil. (short story) (Regrets Only)
Dec 22, 1994; ... It is my birthday, my twentieth birthday, and I'm in the bar of one of the Art Deco hotels on the beach when I meet her. They are always using this hotel on Miami Vice, although they are careful to take tight shots of the pink front and not show the bums and junkies down the street, not ...
Lurch, whose story doesn't end. (poem) (Regrets Only)
Dec 22, 1994; ... It's as though you're snowed in at the airport forever. Or you're sent to purgatory, say: you spend all this time learning the story of your own life and then you don't get to tell it. This one begins with me and the other guys carrying stuff into our half ...
Peaches and plums. (fiction) (Regrets Only)
Dec 22, 1994; ... The father took the children for long walks on Sundays because he imagined they shared his enthusiasm for the flat fields of the Beauce in summer, with the light clouds drifting across a pale sun, the hawthorn hedges flecked with fragile white flowers, and the edges of the wheat stained with ...
Heritage. (poem) (Regrets Only)
Dec 22, 1994; ... He could appreciate all The explosion accomplished, The tools they handed him, the manifold tools And their manifold applications. As I was starting to say--the explosion ... A pungent lawlessness in the air, Like sheep ablaze. He found the barrenness Quite attractive, and said so, So that ...
Inside the Chinese room. (poem) (Regrets Only)
Dec 22, 1994; ... My one bulb may cast more shadows than light (the corners are always lost) but it proliferates in the red and black lips of my four thousand six hundred twenty-three lacquered trays, and I can seewell enough to do my job. The room is compact. I can reach any word within seconds. My ...
Paths, crossing. (poem) (Regrets Only)
Dec 22, 1994; ... Seven geese, southwest, and seven flat-black ships, converging in the Colorado sky, beforethe pale haze of early winter, bright and bronze and empty, on a Sunday just approaching noon.I count the birds again: seven. And the helicopters: seven, in a line northeast, their ...
Our own ones. (poem) (Regrets Only)
Dec 22, 1994; ... I will be coming up the hill from school in an hour ...Lena stretches to the clothesline as Carl is coming slowly back over from the barn ... Between them the field dips deep and the fieldSlopes long and half the day, already, is done. She pushes a wooden pin onto a cotton ...
We should not let Munich slip away. (poem) (Regrets Only)
Dec 22, 1994; ... There was rain which soon turned To snow and no place we had in mind We wanted to go so we stayed in bedAnd made love all afternoon ... As the lamps lit the street We got up from each otherBecause there was money to be made Because we did not grow our own food, Because ...
Uncle Snort. (poem) (Regrets Only)
Dec 22, 1994; ... My aunt was upset by lesbians: Her sister, her sister's lover, in particular. She imagined them, I think, giving each other Head over and over, though from what I knew --And I knew plenty--that couple made love With roughly the same frequency As did Auntie and Uncle Snort. They All had ...
The taxidermist. (short story) (Regrets Only)
Dec 22, 1994; ...April Owen shows up at my flat around midnight. He doesn't knock, but I spot him waiting in lurk beyond the screen door. Outside, the rain jumps like pixies on the floodlit blacktop. His hair is soaked and his boots are muddy. "Come on in," I say, and he does, ...
Welcome, fear. (poem) (Regrets Only)
Dec 22, 1994; ... For one thing I'm glad the goal of enlightenment means being so utterly stupid as to actually slip out the door every morning & live. With no second-guessings, no poses, just this leaning & slouching the experts term hope. Because people like me aren't guilty of laughing at the passing ...
The shy. (poem) (Regrets Only)
Dec 22, 1994; ... We even breathed shyly, all the while envying everybody their courage & finesse. But either our nerve gave out, or we were much too patient, always over-rehearsed, like those old men, the frowners who spend hours fly casting in the park, practicing, each flick of their wrists erasing the ...
Who owes us. (poem) (Regrets Only)
Dec 22, 1994; ... No one owes us anything. We claim it's mother and father.How can you live in this place? The floors are so dirty and it stinks.I sit waiting for the mailman. There's a package he's bringing. Why isn't he here yet?The worm is alive. The apple tree, the coyote, ...
Glory. (poem) (Regrets Only)
Dec 22, 1994; ... The autumn aster, those lavender ones, and the dark-blooming sedum are beginning to bloom in the rainy earth with the remote intensity of a dream. These things take over. I am a glorifier, not very high up on the vocational chart, and I glorify everything I see, everything I can think of. I ...
The death of Shelley. (poem) (Regrets Only)
Dec 22, 1994; ... A punt, a water keg and some bottles washed up on the beach at Viareggio. Eight days passed before they found the body. The face and hands were fleshless, and everybody knows Keats's poems were in his breast pocket, though what pierces me the most is how the book was doubled back as if the ...
Rising bodies. (poem) (Regrets Only)
Dec 22, 1994; ... On July 14, 1954, Frida Kahlo, who had swallowed the world whole, sat up in the crematorium cart and spit it out, her hair blazing like an aureole, her face smiling in the center of a sunflower before she disintegrated along with her seeds. The phenomenon of heat causing a body to rise has ...
Where everything is when. (poem) (Regrets Only)
Dec 22, 1994; ... The June humid stars puff above the living giving our street the delicate shade of a sad mirror given to dark compulsion.How strange everything is when everything is so simple.The people of our street pace the spotlit sidewalks, they so not speak, they wait like patients ...
Creepy about being. (poem) (Regrets Only)
Dec 22, 1994; ... I'm hanging out and on, on a froggy Saturday with my friends Tragedy, Ecstasy, Doom, and So On, stimulisting in the O room, motivated by the jukebox of haunted songs.Here, when it gets dark, it gets very late and as cold as the sibyled voice invented by insomnia, in the ...
Creche. (poem) (Regrets Only)
Dec 22, 1994; ... Would you know a saint if you saw one? Say you're on the delivery table, legs drawn up For each agonizing push, while everyone else is poised To welcome forth your frightened protdgee-- When, instead, a smiling light slowly issues out From your dark interior, assembling itself Like a mirage ...
The work. (poem) (Regrets Only)
Dec 22, 1994; ...1. TodayToday, this moment, speechlessly in pain, He fights the terror of being poured out, The fall into darkness unquenchably long So that even as he hurtles he keeps holdingBack like a dam the flood overtops--but nothing now Can stop that surge, already he swirls ...
The souls. (poem) (Regrets Only)
Dec 22, 1994; ...The SoulsPoised in the garden just before dawn Souls hover in a trance before the window Or fly slanting and darting through the trees.And down on the plain where the sun Has yet to rise but whose heat roils Upward and turns the night to silver vapor,Souls ...
Chance becomes my science. (poem) (Regrets Only)
Dec 22, 1994; ... Though I've lived a life and I have lived amongst men and I have Loved this life as an experiment--an act of science And an act of ruth--I've kept for this city my last half heart (I lost the other to the chance of art. And so, stirred of a loud silence, Slow snow as the city ...
Dreamoblie Joseph Cornell. (poem) (Regrets Only)
Dec 22, 1994; ... Showered in ghosts his trees sing forked over by wind each inherits a musical gift but the fever's got by subscription revelry abounds on wet cobblestones of the commuter moon the moon's new zoo's main attractions being card-boxed turmoil (say the mobile mind breaks down on its own Utopia ...
Dreamoblie Francis Bacon I. (poem) (Regrets Only)
Dec 22, 1994; ... With your brother nepenthe you fell through ashen snow his eyes colored a deep caged absolve lifted you spirits green pigeons clawed your lone pant leg intent to fly sexless and regenerative wind in your ear a meditative gait in ...
Hot. (poem) (Regrets Only)
Dec 22, 1994; ... He eats in silence as frost plumes at the panes and stars tighten, teeth marks on the freezing sky. His boots stand in snow water, melting by the wood stove that he burns hot to husk his legs of cold. The fire bumps, drops, cracks in the stove. His wife and daughters' talk goes louder then ...
Glass. (poem) (Regrets Only)
Dec 22, 1994; ... His father, two brothers, and me, we turned off our saws for a rest of water and cake. Thirsty, he stopped, walked over and the loader's back gate yawned and slipped its catch, threw him down onto a fresh stump, still that pink-white wet. I scooped him up. Blood fell on the path, my arms. He ...
True stories. (poem) (Regrets Only)
Dec 22, 1994; ... Already pregnant, she writes her name and his, Lou and Mike, over the cloudy pictures in True Stories. Black-and-white pictures of a leggy woman (Lou) draped, the arching stem of her throat almost tears from her head, so thrown back with pounds of hair and a dark man's (Mike's) kisses. Done ...
Neglect. (poem) (Regrets Only)
Dec 22, 1994; ... The muscular hollows: eye, lung, heart, stomach, hand. The parts that you enliven: lips, hair, spine. The necessary and cleansing wastes--sweat, blood, urine, stool, and sperm.But certain places of my body ...
The off season. (short story) (Regrets Only)
Dec 22, 1994; ... Zip's getting married," Chase tells Marianne, coming into the bedroom and shutting the door behind him. "Oh. Who's the woman?" "Her name is Flora Ritchie." "And when is the baby due?" He narrows his eyes at her. "December." He pulls his shirt ...
The house we pass through. (poem) (Regrets Only)
Dec 22, 1994; ... It is just a family. I am just a girl posing at the mirror in a flowered cotton shift, combing back my short hair, deciding whether I'm beautiful. I know the creak in the floor by heart and the hiss of the door behind me, drawing itself shut. When I cross the room, my brothers and sisters ...
Love. (poem) (Regrets Only)
Dec 22, 1994; ... An insane bald homeless white man on a children's bicycle rode over to where my girlfriend and I were walking and he said, "Couldn't find a real woman?" My girlfriend is black.Okay, tell me--what does one do in this situation? The man must have been at least sixty, but he was very ...
We are not like other people & do not need them. (poem) (Regrets Only)
Dec 22, 1994; ... There is a danger in living; it is why we file our nails instead of our wrists; it is why we label things away. It's why when we think of mass transit we think of concentration camps, we think of people packed like oysters in the little shells we're allowed, the brine & hope of forgiveness ...
Sunglasses & hats. (poem) (Regrets Only)
Dec 22, 1994; ... When we thought of the future it was wonderful & well-lit. The sky could hold anything.He chants about Beelzebub, Black Arnie & his mismatched angels, about supplicants warblers that always tag along: a talisman against the learning the church leaves out. He is on one leg & braced, ...
The Blue Hour.
Dec 22, 1994; ... A novel by Elizabeth Evans. Algonquin Books, $17.95 cloth. Reviewed by Janet Desaulniers. In Elizabeth Evans's first novel, The Blue Hour, the narrator, Penny, recounts her teenaged years with both a child's twitchy, anticipatory dread of the future and an adult's sorrowful ...
The Great Fires: Poems, 1982-1992.
Dec 22, 1994; ... Poems by Jack Gilbert. Knopf, $20.00 cloth. Reviewed by David Daniel One of the joys of reading Jack Gilbert's The Great Fires is how stubbornly it celebrates the courage and beauty found in the most habitual, commonly shared moments of our lives. This will come as news to no ...
Igloo Among Palms.
Dec 22, 1994; ... Stories by Rod Val Moore. Univ. of Iowa, $22.95 cloth. Reviewed by Don Lee. Selected by Joy Williams for the 1994 Iowa Short Fiction Award, Rod Val Moore's Igloo Among Palms proves to be a highly original and engaging collection. Set in dusty towns on both sides of the ...
Mercy Seat.
Dec 22, 1994; ... Poems by Bruce Smith. Univ. of Chicago, $9.95 paper. Reviewed by David Rivard. In the epigraph to a poem called "Self-Portrait as Ornette Coleman," Bruce Smith quotes the legendary saxophonist as saying of Spike Jones's treatment of an old standard, "He'd take `Stardust' and ...
Coconuts for the Saint.
Dec 22, 1994; ... A novel by Debra Spark. Faber and Faber, $22.95 cloth. Reviewed by Ann Harleman. Bright, wistful, and brash, Debra Spark's first novel, Coconuts for the Saint, snares the reader instantly. On the surface it is a mystery story: Who is Sandrofo Cordero Lucero, and what is he ...
Late Empire.
Dec 22, 1994; ... Poems by David Wojahn. Pittsburgh Poetry Series, $10.95 paper. Reviewed by Diann Blakely Shoaf. "History has to live with what was here," wrote Lowell in one of his offhand but authoritative pronouncements. In an age emerging from the New Critical hegemonic concept of literary ...