Partially green leaves are falling on Camille’s Italian restaurant where grapes tint our lips, and the linens are more inviting than our bed. Our eyes shine like the blue glaze on our plates. Heat radiates through the shale of my spine now suddenly recalling the black bitter chill of deep sea as if my body…
The muscular hollows: eye, lung, heart, stomach, hand. The parts that you enliven: lips, hair, spine. The necessary and cleansing wastes— sweat, blood, urine, stool, and sperm. But certain places of my body are not specified or named until reached by the first unexpected drop of rain, or the careless, accidental touch of your fingernail….
MASTHEAD Executive Director DeWitt Henry Editor Don Lee Poetry Editor David Daniel Assistant Editor Jessica Dineen Editorial Assistant Jodee Stanley Founding Publisher Peter O'Malley Staff Assistants: Brijit Brown and Matt Jones. Fiction Readers: Billie Lydia Porter, Esther Crain, Michael Rainho, Maranne O'Hara, Lee Harrington, Karen Wise, Elizabeth Rourke, Stephanie Booth, Jodee Stanley, David Rowell, Barbara…
One day Will arrived at work to find a new receptionist sitting behind the front desk, and all that morning he found himself contemplating his brief glimpse of her. She was a large woman, not just in size but also in the boldness of her features-her eyes were big and blue, her cheeks were daubed…
It was the wrong place to look for resurrection. Memorial Day, one hundred four degrees Fahrenheit. Cloudless sky. Square parking lots surrounding new motels. Always more loss required, always. And after, feeble gestures to shape what remains into a marvelous bird. It would have been fine with me to know only enough of grief to…
Zip’s getting married,” Chase tells Marianne, coming into the bedroom and shutting the door behind him. “Oh. Who’s the woman?” “Her name is Flora Ritchie.” “And when is the baby due?” He narrows his eyes at her. “December.” He pulls his shirt off. “But it was still a bitchy thing to say.” “Sorry.” She watches…
When Ploughshares first called me about editing this issue, it was a cool afternoon, thanks to an early fog rolling in from the San Francisco Bay, and I was in the garage working out with Gerardo G., a kickboxer and recent graduate in electrical engineering from UC Berkeley. He was pummeling me next to a…
That’s a cute-looking girl there in the sports section. A little flat-chested, but pretty. The caption says: “Bubba Day follows through on his way to victory in the Insurance Classic.” Wait a minute, is that a typo? No, what I thought was a mistake is really the truth. Her ponytail is really his bicep on…
In the mind there comes a moment when shadows fall back like men from a gust of something, when the brain is light as a fly on your wrist— and in the jeweled eyes of that fly you see your own six-legged self white-shoed, dancing, being on parade— the gold tuba grown from your…
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