Ploughshares is pleased to present Paul Yoon with the nineteenth annual John C. Zacharis First Book Award for his short story collection Once the Shore: Stories (Sarabande Books, 2009). The $1,500 award, which is named after Emerson College’s former president, honors the best debut book by a Ploughshares writer, alternating annually between poetry and fiction….
Psychic rib soaped clean, skeleton key to every lock in this house. Heartless, this place, as I’ve come to christen it. The wish then abandoned in the soap dish, near the wet bone china. Last Christmas saw us shivering at Lake Erie, stroking the battered nose of a dinghy. Abandoned. Bone- clean, its hull scoured…
One moment you were tossing me a football in the empty field behind your house and the next I was getting clobbered by a linebacker and run over by a safety. Forty years vanished in that instant when the pigskin touched my hands, which are still soft, and the defensive end straightened me out with…
In some corner of this desert plateau, native habitat to the partly run-over soda bottle, freckled with spilled antifreeze and pied patches of putrid something or other, a plastic bag is snagged like a tumbleweed in a perfect cube of hedge. At night, heat radiates off concrete like an exhale of relief in this legendary…
1 God’s image was in the mirror and God’s image was my grief. And lo, I knew I was not loved by Him and wept. And I knew shame. For though I was young, I was not young enough to weep in the face of the Lord who made me. 2 In sorrow, I set…
When you’re sixteen with pristine nipples it’s hard to imagine you’ll go a little bit blind one morning years later trying to read a bottle, but in point of fact you’ll be standing in the shower in early fall in Maine at the age of 43, the water will be brisk and zesty, and though…
The two-person elevator that smells of pastries makes my lover so close joy in him is sealed into my childhood. Days, dogs off the leash bark at fountain’s aerial braids of water. Nights, letters leak through a shutter. Visiting my country I am always a stranger but distance is familiar and light. In this happiness…
Your beautiful pink asshole breathes when I breathe. All the words I want to say I want to say later. Let’s cheat on you with you. Is it possible to completely cover someone’s body with semen. Turn over and put your head on my stomach. You respond to every gurgle. You say we have pickles….
Fifty years ago my mother’s hands held this detective novel. She knew the world included secret passions, vile schemes, threats. Who killed Lili Godreau? The question should not be left unanswered! From Poitiers come two young detectives, Piéchard and Boivert, they are not stupid but they lack intuition. When a second murder happens they have…
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