My father stands and sways before the mirror, in the blue tiled bathroom, shaving. The wide legs of his boxer shorts empty as windsocks, the neck of his white cotton undershirt fringed with curly black hairs. My mother is asleep. Overnight his shaving brush has stiffened into the shape of a flame. When he swirls…
I don't know if I have lost as much as you but last night I lay awake listening to the pipes purl on and this old house give and wheeze, leaving port for who knows where. You probably know all about lying awake, the recommended counting backwards, the dark which is empty which is forgetting…
MASTHEAD Directors DeWitt Henry Peter O'Malley Coordinating Editor for This Issue Philip Levine Assistant Director / Managing Editor Jennifer Rose Associate Fiction Editor / Office Manager Don Lee Thanks this issue to: Mary Karr, Michael Milburn, Mariette Lippo, Deborah Lotterman; our interns Elizabeth Detwiler and Shannon Henry; and our readers Rafael Campo, Anne Friedman, Doina…
My father, in a 1956 gray suit, had the jungle in his tie, a macaw on Kelly green. But today is Saturday, no briefs to prepare, and he's in a T-shirt. I sit on his lap with my ABC Golden Book, and he orders the letters to dance. The A prancing red as an apple….
Sometimes all the meanness in our house condenses to thick smoke: the black-lettered words from our fights, gray mist of barely nasty thoughts, the chemical grimness of our meals, oils secreted while screaming, even the runny filth of our son's diapers steams into our faces like fog from some poisoned sea to blind us, choke…
You're going to waste away in dreams so thin they'll slide down a long straw and disappear in a stream going counterclockwise in Tasmania. We're having fritters and syrup, wheatcakes and strawberry butter, double-roasted coffee, and heavy cream. It's your summer solstice, blue green basic morning. This is positively your last chance. I mean it….
Editing an issue of Ploughshares turned out to be more mysterious than I expected. I began by taking a few poems and a story that I thought had form and significance. After that, I found myself looking at manuscripts as if they were fragments of something larger — pieces of glass from a crystal ball…
Like an accordion, a plastic, penicillin-green curtain stretched and cordoned off the room, aluminum handles disappearing with a click into the wall. Mrs. Hansen then nodded behind her bifocals as Theresa Mills stood unaspiringly in front of the corkboard, bleeding crucifix, and flag to read out loud the first chapter from our Social Studies text,…
In heartland cafeterias, I hear the resolute chirp of women heaping pale food on white platters, tuna surprise, baby corn niblets, flash-frozen cod, potatoes whipped, ridged, stuffed, mashed, washed down with peach cobblers, coconut pie, sighing under vanilla ice cream in a scoop, and loaves, wafers, snaps, strips, squares, puffs, crullers, cakes, guests at the…
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