Café You was more than a coffee house, more than the campus hangout. More than a dungeonesque door, a sunken room, and sofas leaking white stuffing, as if mice tunneled in the cushions while customers chatted overhead. It was more than a refuge when winter made life miserable. It was magnetic. Each roasted coffee bean,…
After Posidippus When my ship was wrecked on the rocks, and I died, Leophantos, a traveler, found me. Long on the road, he mourned by my side and wrapped a shawl around me. Alone by the sea he buried me and offered up his prayer. But I, too small to tell him of my…
It happened to me once. Winter came and snow quilted every inch. I stood on the soap box as I was told, and made staggering accusations. The public ignored so I retreated behind the potted yew. I was waiting for a moment I was supposed to have on a balcony overlooking the giant gridded landscape….
BETTY ADCOCK is the author of five books of poems, most recently Intervale: New and Selected Poems, finalist for the Lenore Marshall Prize and co-winner (with Caroline Kizer) of the 2003 Poets’ Prize. Adcock has won two Pushcart Prizes, in addition to the North Carolina’s Governor’s Medal for Literature and the Texas Institute of Letters…
RYAN BERG, a graduate of The New School, received an M.F.A. in Creative Nonfiction from Hunter College in 2008. He received a 2008 artist residency at the MacDowell Colony, and is currently working on a memoir about the two years he spent working with gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender youth living in foster care in…
i. Old gold stars & a basket full of spinning eggs. I have been lit by handless fire: I surrender. ii. A sliver cricket chirps Luna! Luna! quickening yellow eyelids of awe. iii. Whose milky nipple nurses a galaxy? Whose changeable face peers over a cradle? iv. Crone who never dies…
The footsteps are unanimous, an urgent ovation which I took as the most wrong moment to show myself. If compassion struck the hull to pull us down, who could show compassion then to one such as myself? But eventually the storm moved on, silence proclaimed the shipmen gone and I lay on my back in…
Running throughout this issue, though not by editorial design, is that typically postmodern sense of absence, in so many configurations: in the memoir, for instance, as loss; or in fiction, as the absence of fulfilled desire, the basic plot of a story being that someone wants something and has problems getting it; or in poetry,…
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 2008…
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