Penance
I offer up this flowerbox my skull dear whomever let its luxuriance exceed its baseness let me curl in the blueblack root hairs and wait for you wind in my teeth will sough sweetly
I offer up this flowerbox my skull dear whomever let its luxuriance exceed its baseness let me curl in the blueblack root hairs and wait for you wind in my teeth will sough sweetly
I can turn the space of him over in my hands. See if it comes apart, if it’s permeable. Does it keep time, shrink, dissolve on flesh. Does it bounce. Can I back that thing up. Can I see if it stands, if it cuts correctly. If it can clothe me. If I can I…
“When I went to a movie set for the first time, I felt that the person I was most like was the set designer,” Alice Hoffman tells me as we sit in a room whose centerpiece is a vivid bouquet of the same tea roses that bloom in the yard beyond the window behind her….
On a factory floor I felt for my keys. It was eight o’clock by the clock on the stall. (I meant to write wall) The tiles were one foot by one foot and sea foam green spoke the little shroud over the letters above the drill room door. Once it was useful to think of…
I’m dumb about the world. To me, it always looks haunted, impoverished—especially in snow, which returns it to black and white. And sometimes I look and see nothing— but the elementary smoke rising from a human village, overpopulated, and yet undermade. A woman from there is walking along the side of the road to the…
There is a moment in every sail, whether you’re in a ten-foot dinghy or in a fifty-foot-plus cruiser, when the physics of wind and water catch hold of you. You can feel it in the lift of the boat against your back and in the way the muscles of your legs involuntarily tighten to compensate…
We thought we were onto something new. We loved doing it in the out-of-doors, thought ourselves pioneers: the first to sneak off into the darkness, unzip the fly, to feel a breeze on the back of our necks, to open our mouths, our hearts, his heart. We were partial to certain places: the park, the…
Greek. 1. A traveled way; a road. 2. A traveler’s way; journey. The idea of a woman as a road has a certain appeal: I think of setting off along myself, boots sucking softly at the mud. The Greeks imagined the uterus hiking up and down. The booted empty uterus, sniffing for blood. And the…
John C. Zacharis Award Ploughshares is pleased to present Christine Sneed with the twenty-first annual John C. Zacharis First Book Award for her short story collection, Portraits of a Few of the People I’ve Made Cry (University of Massachusetts Press, 2010). The $1,500 award, which is named after Emerson College’s former president, honors the best…
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