Spring 2021
Spring 2021
The Spring 2021 Issue. Ploughshares is an award-winning journal of new writing. Since 1971, Ploughshares has discovered and cultivated the freshest voices in contemporary American literature, and remains prescient in the digital age by providing readers with thoughtful and entertaining literature in a variety of formats. Find out why the New York Times named Ploughshares “the Triton among minnows.”
As guest-editor Laura van den Berg writes in her introduction, “At its core, literature is perhaps about simultaneously engaging with the past, with the ugliness and strangeness and wonder of history, while also creating new shapes on the page...In all of the works included in this issue, I felt the awesome gale-force of imagination blowing through the lines and the sentences; I felt possibility; I felt a meaningful augmentation to the collective understanding taking place.” The Spring 2021 issue features poetry and prose by Helen Phillips, Fernando A. Flores, Kaveh Akbar, Eloisa Amezcua, Carl Phillips, and many others.
Introduction
Fiction
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Imagine Me Carrying You
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Ambien and Brown Liquor
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Black Communion
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Bark
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Seaworthy
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Hallelujah Rides
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How I Came to Understand
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I Survived the Plague by Selling Gospel
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Could Be a Wasp
Poetry
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Language is a Moving Belt
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There are 7,000 Living Languages
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Pilgrim Bell
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Excerpts from a Post-Fight Interview: Bobby Chacon Lives for Tomorrow
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Fighting Is Like a Wife
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It Was Just an Opening
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Defense
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Glossary for What You Left Unsaid: Puñal
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all the earth could bear
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Intro to Theater
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Someone Told Us Streetlights Kicked on Midafternoon, Sky
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A Huge Loop-de-Loop in the Blue: What Is That?
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The Tree
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Ghazals Connected as Though Cargo Freights
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In Life
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Ian Brought a Claw-Foot Tub from Williston to Cornwall
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Sundial
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The Hug / El abrazo
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Insomnia / Insomnio
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[ into the mountain ]
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Rusted Staples on a Bulletin Board
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Brain Basics
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February II
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Freudenschreck
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What No One Told You
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Entries from Hottest Year on Record
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In a Dream, My Dead Father Crashes a Party
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In a Dream, My Dead Father Teaches Me About Sound As It Relates to Time
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The Weeds
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οχευς (strap of a helmet; bolt of a door)
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συμβολον (knuckle-bone)
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Perennial Spring
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Amagansett Pome
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The Last Communist
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Sunlight in Fog
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from Lost
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Romanticism
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Monstrous
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Revenant
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Fish Brook
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Driving Past the Properties I Landscaped as a Teenager
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Epithalamion beginning with The Tempest
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Book of Hours
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Settling and Unsettled
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Censor
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Poem About My Life
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Wang Xin Tai Says Goodbye
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hike