John C. Zacharis Award Ploughshares is pleased to present Christine Sneed with the twenty-first annual John C. Zacharis First Book Award for her short story collection, Portraits of a Few of the People I’ve Made Cry (University of Massachusetts Press, 2010). The $1,500 award, which is named after Emerson College’s former president, honors the best…
The hurricane’s advance team of breezes administers a poll to my oak trees. The author, having scented disaster, having been awake for hours, advises his trees not to answer. Telephones trill on nightstands, requiring weary authorities to sit on the edges of their beds with their heads in their hands as instructed by disaster movies….
The Inca gave the lightless places names. Fox, toad, serpent. A black llama with faint eyes. The space between my hands and the keyboard. I have forgotten how the sonata begins. Photo printed in black and white, so that the wine looks clear. The mirror in a dark room, waiting for monsters. In the city…
Grizzly bears, electric bears, fire bears—these three are the most dangerous bears, my three-year-old daughter informs me. I don’t know how she knows what she knows, yet she knows many things. Lately it is all about bears. Electric bears? I ask her. I’ve never seen an electric bear. If you go into his cave, he…
Torchlight splinters in a crystal chandelier. Rebels have taken the palace. Yet, your mind sleeps safely in its skull. But, Sigmund Freud sets a fly in it. “We are made such that we can derive intense enjoyment only from contrast and little from a state of things.” Though the poli-sci major says that’s just one…
Chipped ivory, wire into the wall, a hole for headphones— This piano came from that one, the first piano, a dark wooden body we sheltered in, a father broad as an ark. I could float alone in it, go back and forth, E-flat, E, and slip between tipped sky and dirty penny taste in the…
I was on the bus, on my way to see Dad, trying to distract myself by looking at all the cruddy people and their misery, but it was a total no go, I couldn’t concentrate; and then I was standing there in front of him saying (just like I’d rehearsed), I’m really sorry to interrupt…
What separates four pounds of ground chuck elk from four pounds of ground chuck beef is two spoonfuls of black pepper, parsley, and seasoned salt. Source: the group home cookbook. When the game warden dragged a bull off the autumn highway or hauled a warm-bellied cow some poacher left to rot, he phoned us. I…
If torture is the Queen of Truth then what is the King of Truth? Could it be the Black Dog, ennui, accidia, can the King rule by the weight of the ink (oh, I pray not the pixels!) on an execution order? Could the King be numbed by dum-dum fever? Could the King be a…
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