I was nearing the middle of my life when I became a girl. Up until then I was a woman, work-possessed, abstracted, safe. I wore khaki corduroy trousers weathered down to the gauze weave and a puffy and rather grimy electric-turquoise coat, and I cut my black hair short and blow-dried it perkily aloft. I…
"It is only during times of celebration or mourning that loved ones are together," my father says. "Not like in the old country when everybody lived and worked as a village." He and his siblings have moved further apart and spoken less through the years. On the phone, they tell each other how preoccupied they…
There were helicopters in the earth and they rose and flew through the earth each morning they flew into our flowerpots our balconies As they circle over us, right next to us, their iron boxes with propellers shine Sonya sticks her fingers she’s putting her fingers she shovels her fingers in my gums me to…
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…
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