On the Schuylkill Expressway, in the midst of a snarl of traffic, a truck from N.Y.C. pulled up alongside, with red filigree appearing through a film of grit in swirls like an ice cream sundae: “Coconut Don Fu Delight,” the fading billboard explained, evoking “tasteless bean curd with a white chewy sweetness of caramelized coconut,”…
Peeking for hours into the fire, I find the faces staring back— marching cities rise and fall. Still as stone I sit, practicing death. My machine of flesh hangs lightly. Our body’s noise keeps us sleeping. Later we arise into dreams, and awake to Jacob’s ladder. At death we graduate. There the slow-mo stomp of…
We lost a very good friend, Richard Yates, on November 7, 1992. He died of emphysema and of complications from minor surgery in a Birmingham, Alabama, veterans hospital. Though largely unknown to the public in recent years, Dick Yates's reputation among writers was nonpareil. Robert Stone called Yates one of the best writers in the…
I had a boyfriend my sophomore year of college who wanted to marry me. After we graduated, of course. We were both enrolled in small private schools in North Carolina, his for boys, mine for girls (we were not yet men and women). Unlike me, Bill already knew what he wanted to be: an orthopedic…
Coach looks at the scoreboard, tries again to press another loss in the backcourt of his brain. The players feel their blood quiet, return to its common wander. The fans shake their heads like tired dogs, put on their coats, hats, gloves, leave the bleachers, head back to what’s always there. The cops shrug, step…
Again, what’s the theme?” my friend, the painter Stephen Henriques, asked. We had just enjoyed a tasty sidewalk lunch blocks from his studio in San Francisco’s Richmond District. That we should be meeting to choose from his recent work a cover for this issue of Ploughshares seemed natural. Two books of mine — Things Ain’t…
She is all definition, the woman, her summer Dress pleated with sweat. In the firm prow of her belly, in the hold Her cargo settles In, as if to stay. When it comes she will be flat Which is herself again, Another. Outside dry grasses nudge each other as if to say Lie still again,…
The gym is closed, locked for the night. Through the windows, a quiet beam from the streetlights lies across center court. The darkness wraps itself around the trophies, lies softly on the coach’s desk, settles in the corners. A few mice scratch under the stands, at the door of the concession booth. The night wind…
In heaven there is no beer. That’s why: There was a bar outside of Pigeon Forge, crawled back onto a flat space hanging off its mountain, where someone, seemingly inspired by great forces, had seen the fiction of her body, and in tribute rendered it fantastically, overwhelmingly, in fluorescent paints across the entirety of the…
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