I’m very worried when I see the boy from my writing workshop, gloomy Chico Lopez, strolling down St. Mary’s Street with Julio, who used to live next door. This looks like a bad connection. They’re talking busily with their heads together, carrying sacks. I’ve never seen Chico look so animated before. Is it just that…
This issue marks a transition for Ploughshares — a small but not insignificant change in editorial policy, one of several that have occurred over twenty-three years of publication. Originally, Ploughshares was edited by a committee of writers who had founded the journal: Harvard graduate students, Irish expatriates, Iowa Workshop refugees, New York School and Bowery…
The fonts in all the churches are dry. I run my fingers through the dusty scallops of marble: not a drop for my hot forehead. The Tuscan July heat is invasive to the body but not to the stone churches that hold onto the dampness of winter, releasing a gray coolness slowly throughout the summer….
His erection startled me. At first, it seemed merely to point me out, acknowledging my part in nothing more than the simple and various human desires in our encounter: the desire to be loved and to be healed, the desire to be naked before another and thus to be understood utterly and to be wordlessly…
They all want me to stop talking to you. My mother with the face of a television blaring answers to the game no one ever guesses— Bill Holden and Deborah Kerr in Bombay making nookie on the graves. The wind cawing senseless to the Blue Moon. Even you are tired of my chatter— Smart girl…
Exiled from yourself, you fuse with everything you meet. You imitate whatever comes close. You become whatever touches you. –Luce Irigaray,This Sex Which Is Not One At night I sleep without movement in the suburbs of a Phoenix desert, having dreams of hot plants in the Andes, dreams filled with parents as they talk to…
I spoke to my daughter, Anya, in complete sentences when she was a conceptee and I listened for a response in her earliest cries. Some books recommended baby talk, and that was my wife, Moira’s, language with Anya, but I preferred plain English. Why offer her ears a blurry target? When it didn’t drive me…
I am reading The New York Times on Sunday, January 4, 1994. There is the following headline: recompense being sought for massacre. The article underneath the headline describes events of seventy-one years ago when a white mob terrorized a black town in Florida. The town was named Rosewood. During the rampage of the white mob…
Thousands of tiny fists tamping the surface of the lake flowing like a wide river gone crazy, southeast, westnorth letting the wind push it around in its bed and the boat hull hugging the shore. What else can she do? Even the trees agree, shaking their crowns, throwing down their leaves as if she were…
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