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  • Everybody Loves a Winner

    “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” —Janis Joplin But when you lose it’s only you and the hard wood maple floor beneath you, your shoulders pinned down, wet shirt on a     clothesline by the knees of a god leather-clad in medieval thigh-highs. He forces you to repeat or he’ll show you…

  • Bread Lines

    “Flour is a fine thing.” —Nadezhda Mandel’shtam Bread we’ve all pissed away Stale crumbs the baby dances On sandwich she won’t eat now Vallejo’s nightmares semi Full colon hungers crackling Like electricity be dash Tween them a hungrier man If we survive moments self dash Abnegation like that We will elect ourselves to The pantheon…

  • Voice as Gym-Body

    In order for a rapprochement with the physical body Only necromancy could be behind it. Racked on a stretcher the I.V. tubes string me up like a cello without a player   Only necromancy could be behind it. These days of horse-drawn betrayal. Like a cello without a player I’m caught, a crown of thorns,…

  • Chaos Theory

    1. Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions For want of a nail the shoe was lost, for want of a shoe the horse was lost, and so on to the ultimate loss—a battle, a world. In other words, the breeze from this butterfly’s golden wings could fan a tsunami in Indonesia or send a small chill…

  • Debra Spark, Zacharis Award

    Zacharis Award  Ploughshares and Emerson College are proud to announce that Debra Spark has been named the 1995 recipient of the John C. Zacharis First Book Award for her novel, Coconuts for the Saint. The $1,500 award — which is funded by Emerson College and named after the college’s former president — honors the best…

  • Blacks in the U.

    There is a new black woman in the English department. Several people told me about her, that she is extremely nice, and that she looks white-like me. The way they described her, I didn’t know what I’d see, though I think I thought to myself, Another “nice” light-skinned girl who knows how to make people…

  • The Brooch

    Some cruel entrepreneur glued jewels onto wings to prevent their broad, papery flowering, the ruby or sapphire or smoky opal hump wedged in an oval frame, its frail gold chain blunted with a pin, so the exotic beetle, living brooch, could plod its strict loop. Pinned to my mother’s monogrammed blouse, that insect circled her…