Because there’s no end to cruelty, Lyle ties half a brick to a hen’s foot, climbs the ladder up the water tower where waits Tony—together, they toss their weighted hens into space: the flung chicken that charts its course across clear air, fans its…
In fiction, our winner is Memory Blake Peebles, for her story “The Sugar Bowl.” “‘The Sugar Bowl,’” Ploughshares’ fiction editor Margot Livesey, writes, “is about one of those evenings when, for good or ill but surely irrevocably, the tectonic plates of a family shift: new alignments are formed, bridges between continents disappear. In a…
an excerpt from In a Foreign Country The map haunts you. You spotted it the day you arrived, hanging on the back of an office door. The words “Land Mine Areas, Bosnia-Herzegovina” are printed in large letters across the top, and each land mine area is labeled on it with a tiny, pale red dot….
When Shirley Weems submarines her Barbie in the shallows, spooking the catfish while her brother and me sit on upturned buckets with cane poles on our side of the pond not bothering anybody, I note how the light around Shirley seems so rosy, all a-twinkle with its own self-contained Shirley music. I pick a dirt…
In poetry, our winner is Josephine Yu, for her poems, “Never Trust a Poem That Begins with a Dream” and “Narcissist Revises Tidal Theory.” Ploughshares’ poetry editor, John Skoyles, writes: “Josephine Yu’s poems are alternately sprightly and grave, saucy and sincere. You never know what you might find: a Catholic school girl blouse next…
A basket in the shape of a sunflower— still hanging on your bedroom wall. You made it in school. You loved it so much you wouldn’t stop making it. Or couldn’t stop. We don’t agree, on what you said. But I was your favorite. I thought, What kind of boy makes such a basket? Professional…
Some say the Army and some the Marines and some say the Air Force is the greatest sight sweeping over this crippled earth but I say love for example a wedding the bride’s face hidden as though no longer hers to share and the sound of wailing oh, Anaktoria what have they done the soldiers…
In nonfiction, our winner is Mary Winsor, for her essay “Rock-a-bye, Ute.” Ploughshares’ Editor-in-chief, Ladette Randolph, writes, “Mary Winsor’s essay, ‘Rock-a-bye, Ute,’ is a meditation on environmental history, native American legend, and family—with its bittersweet ties to the past—refracted through the lens of second chances after bodily pain and loss. As her western family gathers…
and I answer by driving around, which seems to me the most American of activities, up there with waving the incendiary dandelion of sparklers or eating potato salad with green specks of relish, the German kind, salad of immigrants, of all the strange pickled bits we carry over from other places, like we did on…
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