1. Know your origin: you are a tokenof the afterwards of love. What flinchesin the ribbon of your utterly new bloodis nothing but the echo of a bed post—pulse. You have grown up. From filamentwithin your mother’s bulb, you have evolvedinto a chandelier of bones, weightlesslyorbiting your portion of the womb, aglowin skin that holds you…
All winter the ghosts were waitingfor a new high-school teacher who refused to appear, and so youwere roped in. February had the year on pause, the dayslike holes that tripped you over and over in the frozen yard. You hadno knowledge of history or chemistry yet were expected to teachthe dead from a colorful textbook,…
In this borrowed house I keep my doors unlocked. A day in the middleof days where if not for worry I’d be alone. I’m cold as vodka. I dressmyself back to warmth. Two dogs curl asleep downstairs. One gets upto align an invisible orbit then falls, graceless thud against hardwood.O marriage of longing to action!…
John C. Zacharis Award Ploughshares is pleased to present Lysley Tenorio with the twenty-third annual John C. Zacharis Award for his short-story collection, Monstress (Ecco 2012). The $1500 award, which is named after Emerson College’s former president, honors the best debut book by a Ploughshares writer, alternating annually between poetry and fiction. This year’s judge was…
to Sleep I’ll count backward from a thousandtill my teeth begin to grind, down to zero, where the digits tilt and swivelin a ring around the racing eye of the tornado I’m made of tonight.Left alive, I am an opening too wide, much too much gaping skyto slip behind the throbbing canopy of hide I…
My hair was not on fire and the fabric of my shirt didn’t rub me the wrong way.It was the best day of my life when I entered the monastery. My heart was not on firebut enclosed by a high walland covered with new grasses for the white cow who hadtaken up residence there. Each…
Sundays my sister Mary and I’d splitbags of penny candy in the junkyardafter raiding each room of our trailerfor loose change and Pepsi cans.Climbing through the interiorsof gutted clunkers, we declaredtruces that wouldn’t last the day.Our lips puckered from flavors—sour patch, lemonhead, warhead,airhead, sour belt, jawbreaker—that named the failings of our mother’s men.We suffered them…
First the good news: In spite of every dour pronouncement I’ve heard over the four decades I’ve called myself a writer, and probably going even farther back, literature as we know it is not in crisis. Reading is not obsolete. Books are not doomed. Print is not archaic, nor is it likely to become so….
Let the light beyellow but not enough to stingthe eye, close enough to turnoff morning candle-lit, quiet,incandescent, enough to seebeside, clear after morning,to burn on not cold yetnot quite bright enough to readby, and just near absentmindedlyeach night
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