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…
These two satisfied towns gaze at each other like old flames across Mobile Bay—handsome, hidebound Mobile with its lawyers and its cemeteries, and blithe Fairhope, pretty Fairhope, with its galleries and boutiques, Point Clear draped along the eastern shore like a string of pearls. Used to be, the right kind of Mobile family escaped to…
Yep. She fell running across the open space. It wasn’t her fault. It’s just One more thing that happened. Knee bleeding, She wouldn’t get picked for the team. None of us understood, of course. We stood there, looking and looking. I’ve read that in this earth we bring forth wind As if soughing, that we…
At the funeral for the young man I’m trying to sing the complicated song And I’m running out of breath there are too many Changes in direction in this song— some parts Are just for the choir they sound great up above in their loft Then the men sing and that’s surprising— the women Are…
In the church, midweek at noon, there is a middle distance between the piercing blue window of pure belief and the bone vault housing my heart’s disbelief, a dim yielding distance related to my prayer: another day’s delay before you are nowhere— for death fixes all distances like a new nail.
When Megan first moved to London, she lived in the top of a house at the top of Brixton Hill that seemed to her, all fresh and green and hopeful as she was, the very best place in the city. She had been staying in a thieves’ hostel near Victoria while she was looking for…
Near the end of the course, in that part of the hour Reserved for questions, a silence fell on the class When the girl who’d been quiet all semester Raised her hand to ask if anyone there besides her Believed in heaven. An embarrassed silence While each of us wondered why she hadn’t chosen To…
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