A psychological experiment was once performed on horses. Each animal had been taught to stamp a hoof four times, say, when the trainer called out that number. The horses that got the number right were rewarded with a carrot or cube of sugar. But for experiment’s sake, the trainers periodically denied the horses their rewards…
carried a baby heart in my pocket neat pink packet that kept beating a quiet music or calling machine with no reception except in my hand that reached from time to time in my pocket and cradled that only connection to what might have been or was it to what might be
Pit yourself against gutted ships, against the lips of those you love the least, against the hollows where quails spend their lives. Do not sleep. Do not take shape. Ambush the soft armies of seas and the singular face of an adjacent cliff. Scream the way everything screams. Find a small longitude to stitch along…
For this fortieth anniversary issue, I invited former guest editors to contribute new work of their own, to nominate and introduce an emerging writer, or to give an account of turning points in their careers. Among the twenty-five who responded, I include here fiction writers, nonfiction writers, and poets. Longtime Ploughshares readers will recognize the…
There are thirteen ways to look at a blackbird, but my backyard is not a blackbird, and I am not Wallace Stevens, but I make do with an air conditioning unit and the remnants of an entertainment center, the cherry wood stain fading into sod. I look down at this plot of land like I…
It’s the day after Christmas a flat gray morning where the rain has fallen on the crooked streets and no one has stolen our newspaper, its headline denouncing the young Nigerian, someone’s devout beloved son who tried to blow up a plane, my own son half asleep on the couch in his Levis and unraveled…
DeWitt Henry, founding editor of Ploughshares, grew up in an affluent suburban neighborhood of Philadelphia, with three older siblings—two brothers and one sister. His father, the owner of a candy factory, was a recovering alcoholic, a brooding, self-absorbed, volatile man. His mother was a self-sacrificing, long-suffering homemaker with artistic interests. Much of Henry’s writing has…
I always sat in the back of Mr. Kim’s algebra class. He was very enthusiastic about algebra. I drew a picture of me sticking my dick into Rex’s blond dreamgirl. Rex was on the other side of the room. I folded the paper and wrote Rex on the top, and told this ugly girl, Andrea…
The night is tall and strewn with rocks cutting my feet as I climb, panting under the blankets, the quilt. Will it ever be light again? I hear sounds outside, footsteps that I hope are a deer’s cloven hooves. Coywolves in the marsh shriek like banshees over a kill. What, I think, is a banshee,…
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