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  • Go-Between

    The dogs were all shapes and sizes, all colors. Black and white, brown and gray, they sniffed each other, growled, ran here and there, their paths crisscrossing. Alex and Naomi sat on a bench, their backs against the picnic table; she kept turning away from the river, away from the bridge and the cars sliding…

  • Free Checking!

    Desire for the good deal, the hot need to look slick, wordless advertisement for the invisible product, I release you like the dumpster behind the cafeteria releases these long, festering rivers of milk. Fear of death, fear of narrow spaces, love of the wine-red mole that punctuates the transaction-inspiring cleavage of Jill, my credit union…

  • 498

      It is a fine ring of white plaster and red bricks. I saw Juan Belmonte, bullfight idol, here once…when he came down to watch the bulls brought in. This night the fodder for tomorrow’s show was being brought in, too. Files of men, arms in the air. —Jay Allen, “Slaughter of 4,000 at Badajoz,…

  • Seizure

    After the winter of the coma when his wife sued for divorce, after the year of weekly grand mal seizures, Isaac had a job. Now he wanted his sons back—Ethan, who just turned five, and Paul, three and a half. The boys observed their father, if somewhat coolly, from photos posted on the wall behind…

  • Chicken Brick’n

    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…

  • The Sugar Bowl (Emerging Writer’s Contest Winner: FICTION)

      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…

  • Nature Walk

    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….

  • Smote

    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…