Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. —Hebrews 11:1 1. Morphine makes me small, airborne. Like a spider. I rest in a high corner of the ceiling, look down on my body on the white hospital bed. It was just one shot, one needle through my skin….
These are my best days. We’ve ditched class, my boyfriend Paul and I, and are smoking a fat little joint on a stone bench in Rancho San Rafael, the park near his apartment in Reno. The sun is bright and the sky is cloudless and the hills around the city are bald. It’s like I’m…
When you go to your favorite grocery store and this week’s Special is boneless pork tenderloin that you’ll roll in a floured paste with cracked pepper and rosemary before you roast it in a hot oven and serve it with homemade pear chutney do you visualize up to twenty wet pink piglets squirming out of…
1991. A summer storm blows up the coast of Delaware, rearranging the tide on Rehoboth Beach. My husband’s parents take our baby daughter inside, into the house they’ve rented for the week, a box of windows resting on stilts. Released from responsibility, from adulthood, the two of us run into the ocean and give ourselves…
Cohen Awards Each year, we honor the best poem and short story published in Ploughshares with the Cohen Awards, which are wholly sponsored by our longtime patrons Denise and Mel Cohen. Finalists are nominated by staff editors, and the winners—each of whom receives a cash prize of $600—are selected by our advisory editors. The 2009…
Like a river at night, her hair, the sky starless, streetlights glossing the full dark of it: Was she Jewish? I was seventeen, an “Afro-American” senior transferred to a suburban school that held just a few of us. And she had light-brown eyes and tight tube tops and skin white enough to read by…
"Well, you have hair on your vagina. That’s a real buzzkill." This was the response my boyfriend, Brian, gave me when some time around our three-month anniversary I got up the courage to address our disappointing sex life. Later that night, when I called an old roommate to confirm that it was normal to have…
Fall 2009 Cynie Cory‘s "Upper Peninsula Woods" is from White Out, a work in progress. Author of American Girl, Cory currently directs teens in Shakespeare’s Richard III. Louise DeSalvo is the Jenny Hunter Endowed Scholar for Creative Writing and Literature at Hunter College. Among her publications are Virginia Woolf, Writing as a Way of Healing,…
Almost ready, she says as I walk into the drugstore, this strange woman who swivels her neck, to cock her head back at me, while adjusting her bra under her clothes, and I don’t know if she means the rapture, or if she’s waiting for some violence, tires squealing, to drag her off by her…
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