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….
Sent for by mail, a chameleon waits with the rest of the freight for a name. Our name. We risk fraud for what arrives in 8–10 weeks: a limp form, silent at first, but alive. Guaranteed it will improve, we allow for quiet, for its remove in the terrarium: haven’t we summoned nature to our…
The Rio Grande should be repaired sooner or later because it’s a shame what happened to it which is not pretty. Irrigation and all and no sturgeon any more and pubic hairs and pollution. -Harve Benedict, English 12, Elfego Baca High School O hundreds and hundreds of Harves, your writing should have been the death…
With each rebirth, a little more is lost. As pounds of feathers turn to flame—then ash—an ounce, at least, is bound to blow off. Take the breast. It may appear less lushly plumed than myth has led you to expect. In this unfortunate event, permit us to apologize on our bird’s behalf….
No products in the cart.