In poetry, our winner is Rosalie Moffett, for her poems, “Why Is It the More,” “To Leave Through a Wall,” and “Hurricane, 1989.” Ploughshares’ poetry editor, John Skoyles, writes: “Rosalie Moffett’s poems are thoughtful and wise, dramatic and stunning in their perceptions. She handles huge issues (God’s place in the universe; a lost twin;…
In nonfiction, our winner is Eliese Colette Goldbach, for her essay “In the Memory of the Living.” Ploughshares’ Editor-in-chief, Ladette Randolph, writes that the essay “is a haunting meditation from the far shores of addiction, mental illness, and obsession. Eliese Goldbach movingly chronicles her journey from sheltered girl to damaged woman through her obsession…
I think myself thin until a scale calls me to honesty, its numbers the mind of God, unrelenting, and I question a machine that can drive us to uncertainty, to suicide, or into the edges of murder, thinking we are more or less not there or here. One day I walked down a street feeling…
The town where you grew up—the place you’ll always think of as home—has three stoplights, a grocery store, a twin cinema, a post office, two dozen churches, three banks, a hospital, a handful of gas stations, and three factories that produce custom wood furniture, Lee jeans, and outboard motors. There’s a main street where teenagers…
Under her tongue, there was a story. In her mouth, nails. Frances hammered license plates to the back wall of her garage. There hang the years that sunk like a foot in loose soil. That rusted like a hinge. Whose hand or what machine etched the numbers that cruised along in the exhaust of a…
She taught the girl how to roll dough thin, but Frances didn’t teach me. I was too wild to crimp a crust. Once, in a fit, I took off my shoe, raised it above my head, but never meant to throw it. A stranger at the post office recognized someone’s face in my face, noted…
Life, the devil you know, the one you’ve bantered, bartered with, trading this day for that, this love for that freedom, that freedom back for happiness. Something lacking, something gained. The devil is one hell of an investor, turning a profit continuous as flames. You are wood. You are the paper you signed your life…
Love, if you want me to speak, let me find a way out of my sadness. You are everywhere lingering—moss over rock, rock over seed, seedlings about to remember. I recall you in small things and nothing: stones upon water—water turned hard, into rock. Here on the listening lake things burn to be born and…
The smell of her on the book she left behind, the taped tear in the dust jacket, the neatly printed marginal notes, the dog-ears, check marks, underlinings (single and double), the phonetic spelling of the Russian names on the inside of the back cover. Setting it aside I wondered if I had seen too much,…
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