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…
It is just a family. am just a girl posing at the mirror in a flowered cotton shift, combing back my short hair, deciding whether I’m beautiful. I know the creak in the floor by heart and the hiss of the door behind me, drawing itself shut. When I cross the room, my brothers and…
For six months each day at sunrise I’ve watched a woman in bright red trunks run past my window and each time I think of how as a boy I took my stance in front of the steamed mirror, my faded boxers safety-pinned proudly at the crotch and judged my body against all things that…
Polymorphous perverse, dolphins of both genders prefer sex-play with the human female. 1. Water begins from a wound in the hillside, a tear in the clouds. There’s a tin cup no one cares has years of germs on its icy rim. The water is sweeter than anything you will ever hold in …
An insane bald homeless white man on a children’s bicycle rode over to where my girlfriend and I were walking and he said, “Couldn’t find a real woman?” My girlfriend is black. Okay, tell me—what does one do in this situation? The man must have been at least sixty, but he was very muscular, wearing…
Next door the room is padlocked from the outside; inside the children are ransacking the cupboards and playing catch with the empty Cool Whip containers and most afternoons you could’ve found me behind any one of these blue- stained doors, my girdles unhitched, my dusty nylons flagging the window, contesting the smoke rings that peel…
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