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 untila scale calls me to honesty,its numbers the mind of God,unrelenting, and I questiona machine that can drive usto uncertainty, to suicide,or into the edges of murder,thinking we are more or lessnot there or here. One dayI walked down a street feelingmyself there, feeling as thickor thin as I wanted to…
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 platesto 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 machineetched the numbers that cruised along in the exhaust of a town that no longer…
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 oneyou’ve bantered, bartered with,trading this day for that, this lovefor that freedom, that freedom backfor happiness. Something lacking,something gained. The devilis one hell of an investor, turninga profit continuous as flames.You are wood. You are the paperyou signed your life to in exchangefor this sweet spate of days. Thisis…
Love, if you want meto speak, let me find a way out of my sadness.You are everywhere lingering—moss over rock,rock over seed, seedlings about to remember. Irecall you in small things and nothing: stonesupon water—water turned hard, into rock.Here on the listening lake things burn to be bornand then buried—seed into pond, pondinto withering light….
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 nameson the inside of the back cover. Setting it aside I wondered if I had seen too much, more than she might’ve liked me to,more than…
Current face, new domino in the mirror,it doesn’t look like much now, does it?Has anyone seen the infant?Because of course the infant cannot speak.Has anyone seen the week of early March, 1962, origin of the scar on this chin, scarthinned now and the chin short-whiskered.Trying to slide on concrete into home—that wish made a long…
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