At the Delano, the flags are flying half-mast, Honoring the workers released from debt and poverty By the death of parents, by murder, freed by inheritance. “We’ve killed them all,” shout the street cleaners Marching through the lobby with bloodstained hands. Chambermaids wrap themselves like brides in the damask drapes, “We poisoned ours, their miserly…
Desire zeroing in on that Furby eBay auction while smut chat gets caught up in the Hegelian carpet role—the secrets of your life scrawled on Post-it notes that fell off of your dash—a pack of Lucky Strikes stairmastered into Liberty’s verdigrised torch— Ellis Island heavier than an oil freighter grounded in…
MASTHEAD Guest Editors Madison Smartt Bell & Elizabeth Spires Editor Don Lee Poetry Editor David Daniel Assistant Editor Gregg Rosenblum Assistant Fiction Editor Maryanne O'Hara Associate Poetry Editor Susan Conley Founding Editor DeWitt Henry Founding Publisher Peter O'Malley Assistant Fiction Editor: Nicole Hein. Editorial Assistants: Hannah Bottomy, Michael Homler, Kat Steiger, and Jean Hopkinson. Poetry…
Sleeping in your Harlem apartment, I lie on the bed by the window to the airshaft, a dark flume cutting the center of the building, a pigeon’s alley from basement to roof. My head on the sill, I stretch my hands out. You’re in the next room at the upright, winning a young composer’s prize….
at my head and my heart, knife-tips green in a gasoline-doused garden. From the tire store behind the house, leering mechanics glaze my window with saliva. I sit at the end of the couch and point my finger angrily, wag it in the face of forever. I sit back on my haunches and sniff the…
Just one of the many delights of putting together this issue of Ploughshares had to do with the sense of discovery I experienced as I came upon submission after submission which challenged, and changed, my notion of the world. However familiar I might have been with the work of my colleagues in Princeton University’s creative…
I. Frigg’s Linchpin Vinyl spinning, midnight pimping in Mick’s gin mill, my lips mining this fish fry, till my thigh minx Iris flits hips with Jimmy. His pigmy mind thinking I’m blind, thinking bilk, grinding his milt digit with Iris’s fig. I’ll chill his smirk, slit his midriff. My fist’s flying, his spit’s flinging. I’m…
High Lonesome tipped back his hat and his horses snorted. Maybelle nodded, her teacher’s smile a wild azalea in miles of cactus. My uncle’s buckboard groaned to a stop, in town for flour and grease and beans. All that, decades ago, before he taught me how to cowboy. Five summers we broke broncs, patched fences…
My cousin does a wheelie in a muddied Mustang, radish red, parks askew at Quito’s, a clam bar where we drink beer, pine the days of seminary, LSD, Jimi Hendrix playing Strasbourg, the hours when all the Howes were stick-style architects, and every waterfront dry goods was built on ballast rock from Slave Coast turrets….
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