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…
The senior poet collected things. Porcelain and carved hands, postcards, cobalt glass miniatures, World’s Fair memorabilia, contemporary art. I managed his calendar and his townhouse and his art collection, as well as the more domestic routines of buying groceries and cooking dinner five nights a week—if he wasn’t dining out. He’d made clear in the…
A few years ago, on a sunny Saturday afternoon, sitting in the offices of Inprint, Inc., a literary nonprofit based in Houston, Texas, I asked Tony Hoagland if he considered himself to be a cat poet or an ox poet. Rich Levy, another Houston poet, was in the kitchen slicing us an apple to share…
He almost pitied them, those buried with no fare, as he sifted through the sand of their names and singled out the shades who would be granted no passage. Their breath was all cold-packed earth and mossy hush. How many coins he had now—the wake turned up their light when he fingered them. He tallied…
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