Kimberly sat outside at the coffee shop when Caleb Bless ran past, waving from across the street. Like everyone else, she had gorged on the headlines: Newly divorced Caleb Bless on Bourbon Street, intoxicated, giving lap dances to passersby; Caleb Bless brawling with patrons at a bar, at a hotel, at a park—brawling, even, outside…
The girl showed up in early March, the rainy season, a baby tucked under her arm like a picnic basket. Hanna, just finished mucking out the pig stalls, was checking the seedlings in the greenhouse. In the watery, indecisive light that passed for spring these days, the little shoots looked depressed and anorexic. Outside, the…
The first c is sharp; a rock scraped against pavement. The second c is as smooth as a stone washed over by waves. They look identical. Interchangeable. But they are as different as the crescent moon and the snake, slowly strangling its prey. Two syllables. The first means, to be able. To be permitted. As in, I think I can…
Annie Finch recommends Matriarchal Societies of the Past and the Rise of Patriarchy by Heide Goettner-Abendroth (Peter Lang, 2022). “This jaw-droppingly inspiring tome is THE book on matriarchy, by the mother of modern matriarchal studies.” Annie Finch recommends Collected Poems by Lenore Kandel (North Atlantic Books, 2012). “A lost gem of women’s poetry from the Beat era, Kandel’s work is deliciously erotic, and…
April 12, 2025 | Pets I always say that I hate nature, but the more I think about it, I find that I hate nature in the “american midwest” where nature is mostly grass and useless trees. My father was, above all else, a farmer. He hated planting useless trees; he only planted trees that…
Ploughshares is pleased to present Juliana Lamy with the eighth annual Ashley Leigh Bourne Prize for Fiction for her short story “My Country Full of Thieves,” which appeared in the Fall 2025 staff-edited longform issue. The $2,500 prize, sponsored by longtime patron Hunter C. Bourne III and selected by our editors, honors a short story published in the…
“Some sacred beings seem to be sacred to all imaginations at all times. The Moon, for example, Fire, Snakes and those four important beings which can only be defined in terms of nonbeing, Darkness, Silence, Nothing, Death.” This is Auden, from his essay “Making, Knowing, and Judging,” in which he discusses the ways a young writer…
Pa Houa had spent hours in front of a screen foraging through old, forgotten phrases. The poem she was trying to write had vanished. The longer she sat, the more tense her arms and legs became, the more her cursor crawled between caesuras and spaces reserved for commas. She tried tearing down the curtain of…
I had always been so bored when having sex. It was a source of great contention between Lynette and me. Every night in bed I felt the suffocating hands of her desire. She would give me a certain look through half-lidded eyes and I would duly lie down. Then she would sit on my face,…
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