The angle of the postman’s cap looked like he’d dressed himself in dark, the darkness, say, that’s lurching from his mouth, where teeth should be, a smile like charcoal, awkward on this full- grown man, but safer for his world where fuchsia picket fences float above a lumpy car that trails a cautious, chastened string…
When she came into his room he was asleep and when she touched him, he woke— her hand on his shoulder, her knee at his mouth, and in the darkness, she looked like a boy. When he tried to sit up she covered his ears with her hands: “Save ourselves from ourselves,” she said, and…
In the chapel of the Catholic hospice we listened to the list of those who had died in the past six months. I waited to hear the name I had so missed hearing. A woman seated in back comforted a weeping man, her tears hidden, “I told you this would make you feel better. You…
Last week we had a riot. Pomo, my boyfriend, tried to kill himself with a pencil. Everybody freaked. Then eight pigs rushed in and beat the crap out of us. I got put into The Coat. I hate being put into that thing. You can’t breathe. It smells like piss and shit. Though I couldn’t…
That which you made me do I did. That which you made me say I said. Now the blame, like oil over water, spreads, and so our life together that began in vows—the licensed oath— has leased itself back to us both: what we knew and couldn’t know what our words no longer show.
You and I lay together on a grassy bed while one sparrow chased another from a limb. A bumblebee left a flower he seduced, and flew away covered in her scent. I reached my lips to catch your lips before they turned away. “Just a kiss, please a kiss.” “It always starts the same way,…
It’s probably a shame to say so, at least at the outset of an introduction to this issue of Ploughshares, but I may not be a particularly good or efficient reader of other people’s fiction. By nature I am somewhat distractible. And although my distractibility is matched at times by my ability to concentrate, these…
Alberto Ríos, The Curtain of Trees, stories: In nine moving tales, Ríos brings us small-town life along the Arizona-Mexico border. The collection presents a dark worldview, but it resounds with Ríos’s characteristic tenderness, compassion, and power. (New Mexico)
for Gabriella There had been a cricket in the basement when I dreamt you were an unopened envelope on my chest. I heard on the radio how silverware suddenly tarnishes in a drawer before disaster, tornadoes, sudden changes in weather. The voice on the radio, on the lookout, she said, “It’s beautiful . . ….
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