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In the Plan B essay series, writers discuss their contingency plans, extra-literary passions, and the roads not traveled. My father always wanted me to go into real estate. It was in the family: pioneer land swaps and strategic purchases during the Depression kept the Svobodas solvent. My father would stand at the edge of one…
as the voice inside the telephone made crying sounds or allergy sounds. It was that time of year— the particle count high and already a shortage of rental cars and we were all desperate to vacate the premises while you had already done so. Standing between the voice and my self at the center of…
Read it on the Greyhound back before I saw Bogart in Marlowe’s clothes, before the old man bought the Buick, before he changed to dust, before my mother scattered him along the highway to Lake Mead beside a scrubby desert tree. Before I didn’t buy the whiskey, before I didn’t hoist a glass, before I…
One Friday night, the winter I was twelve, my mom’s brother, Tío Erwin, showed up at my grandmother’s apartment in Jamaica Plain with his new wife. She was fifteen. They’d met during his recent trip to Guatemala. She looked like any one of my cousins, only she didn’t weigh as much. Her smile stretched, revealing…
Emerging Writer’s Contest Since 1971, Ploughshares has been committed to promoting the work of up-and-coming writers. After last year’s inaugural fiction contest, this was our first year accepting submissions in all three genres—poetry, nonfiction, and fiction. We are pleased to announce the following winners and runners-up. The winners will each receive $1,000 and be published…
I’m only a human. Always is only in me as long as I last. What do I want? Don’t ask. We forget who we are. Conformists all alone looking for a fake mirror and finding it in some poker nobody sitting across the aisle. To be like some other and feel that. While I am…
Now and then, you heard the copters Flying in search of inmates who’d escaped. Mostly, though, it was quiet. At night, outside, The cats would fight and fuck and knock shit down, The couple next door would simmer in heat Or bitterness. Sometimes you saw them, In the window-glass, appearing Like quarter-moons through mist. There…
When they run out of meat men disappear. I chew my hair, a kind of fullness that is kind, a thread soup. A nest gathers its strands inside me. The dead hatch, translucent-eyed, wire-boned, small whistling through beaks. We share our (secret) feast, miles of hair to keep us warm. I rock on my heels…
At the age of eleven, he composes a short treatise on the sounds of vibrating bodies. Finds it easiest to hear people when they’re asleep: a sound that comes from their dreams. Secretly takes his pulse several times a day in flesh and in vain. Pascal despairs of the husk, delights in the spark, fears…
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