The Plows

Abstract

The Plows Grady Chambers (bio) By then, simple questionshad grown blades: you're not even going to shave came to mean,I don't like the way you look, or that's how I came to hear it.On certain days she'd say, do you love me today? and I would say, even more than yesterday,and she'd say, that's impossible! and I'd say, it's true, and would forget,as I convinced her, sitting near her in the booth, the nights spent fumingmutely through our rooms, hardly saying anything, the groan of pipestightening inside the walls, following each other silently to sleep until in the night we startled awakefrom the sound the plows made dropping their heavy lower lipsagainst the pavement, and she'd rise, and I'd follow, and from the window watchthe wet red brake lights disappearing at the turn, and the new plowed streets shiningblack as snakes amidst the piled snow. [End Page 50] Grady Chambers Grady Chambers is the author of North American Stadiums (Milkweed Editions, 2018), selected by Henri Cole as the winner of the inaugural Max Ritvo Poetry Prize. His poems and stories have appeared in or are forthcoming from The Paris Review, Kenyon Review Online, Prairie Schooner, Boulevard, Joyland, and elsewhere. Chambers is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow, and he lives in Philadelphia. Copyright © 2019 Emerson College