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  • Windfall

    Objects heavy enough to break us hangfrom the thinnest of threads. A stray breezeand down they come. But they say that spider silkis five times stronger than steel, which might bewhy spiders look so buff. I know that I wouldn’twant to run into one in a dark alley, or any alleyfor that matter, though matter…

  • Complacent

              Maybe on the shore of the lake where eagles live and breathe again, swooping over toddlers frightening all, I sought a rock that was flat, one to skip over the calm surface  of the water to impress the child.  And maybe the rock had fallen from another planet, tumbled, burned itself …

  • Andy Warhol hides a third eye

    Translated by Ming Di  With the key of paintbrushhe opens another door;he asks a flower to invite people to a waltz. Light dazzles the dance floor. To the other end of the realm of dreamshe captures the poet John Giorno, sleeping. What game is it, what strangeness, that experiences time?What is time?A capsule? Frozen in…

  • Zoeglossia Introduction

    Silence. Being silenced is a common experience for people with disabilities. Society is uncomfortable with our voices, which are regarded as unwieldy, awkward, too loud, too quiet, too scary, or strange. When we are allowed to speak, others want to control the narrative. They want to read a story or poem that explains the difficulties…

  • Parts

    i. I always buy the charcoal pencils separately, instead of the kit, so they know I’m not an artist. Today, one hard 6B. Plus, a cone of ice cream that stinks of stevia and a pack of tampons. The clock’s at five to midnight, cheap light pooling around the space where the cashier should’ve been….

  • Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction

    Ploughshares is pleased to present Fei Sun with the eleventh annual Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction for her story “Half Bowl of Mengpo’s Soup,” which appeared in the Winter 2021-22 Issue of Ploughshares, edited by Editor-in-chief Ladette Randolph and Poetry Editor John Skoyles. The $2,500 prize, sponsored by acclaimed writer, former guest editor, longtime patron,…

  • Book Recommendations from Our Former Guest Editors

    DeWitt Henry recommends Contributions to Literature: A Tribute to Small Press Books by Jack Smith (Serving House Books, 2021). “Jack Smith—literary editor, novelist, critic, and philosophy teacher—recommends a league of his own, one in which I am proud to be included. Much as there was no ‘great tradition’ before the critic F. R. Leavis invented one, so here Smith…

  • Instead of Introduction

    Time doesn’t move, we move, says Tolstoy, but I am standing still in a trolley as it moves through a provincial city in the USSR—a country that no longer exists—in which two old ladies, who look just like my deceased mother, are speaking a strange mash-up of Yiddish, Ukrainian, Russian (and another language I cannot…