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 thousand till my teeth begin to grind, down to zero, where the digits tilt and swivel in 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 sky to slip behind the…
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 fire but enclosed by a high wall and covered with new grasses for the white cow who had taken…
Sundays my sister Mary and I’d split bags of penny candy in the junkyard after raiding each room of our trailer for loose change and Pepsi cans. Climbing through the interiors of gutted clunkers, we declared truces that wouldn’t last the day. Our lips puckered from flavors— sour patch, lemonhead, warhead, airhead, sour belt, jawbreaker—…
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 be yellow but not candle-lit, quiet, incandescent, not cold yet not bright yet enough to sting the eye, close enough to see beside, clear enough to read …
…even if all the animals are oracles, I don’t want to have a bee under my pillow, even if it’s just a sign of the druidic image of community, even if it signifies the solar dance of the bee replicating the hive of the many in the streets or the village, signified clairvoyants of ultraviolet…
Her family moved to town from Omaha on Christmas Eve. Her father and mother are the new managers of the Sherman Ice Arena, which, thanks to the coal-baron millionaire who owns it, is open all year. It is mid-January now, skating season. Half the town goes to the public skate on Saturday afternoon, the experience…
Greet the walker, walking in with the shadow of the hood shooing away the emphatic light. First cold night the blinds flicker down, each vinyl strip a white notion near as wide. August, gone, feels gone. The woman in another room, ever without honeymoon, hits snooze and spreads her hair behind her like the patch…
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