Adler, Professor of Rabbinics (Emeritus), was annoyed that the young man sitting next to him was interfering with his sleep. Through slitted eyes he watched him, plugged into his music, listlessly turning the pages of a magazine, giving out somehow all the traits Adler had come to dislike in the young—vanity, narcissism, the insouciant attention…
Brick laid down, scritch of the trowel’s downward stroke, another brick set then the flat side of the trowel moving across the top of the course of bricks. My father stepped from the car in his brown loafers, the rest of him is fading but not his loafers, the round spot distended by his big…
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 2007…
For five years my father’s body lay abandoned at the Tri-State Crematory in North Georgia. Along with 333 other bodies, his remains were recovered in 2002. He says he’s been pretty disappointed with the whole thing. Like all of us he had heard of so many possibilities. Like the white light churning at the tunnel’s…
Little engine of barbed wire and autobody, miscellaneous tunes drifting on the thinner. Crystal Dry Ice when the wires weigh down, snap in the snow and the refrigerator dies. Not today, a day born hot, men pouring tar on the grocery store roof before the worst of it arrives, you in a hammock, book in…
The street went up a slight rise and then angled up toward the left, like a raised arm. There were four utility poles on one side: each pole was a T with two crosses, with the wires coming from each pole and extending out in a messy radiance of black lines to the houses and…
In the hundred days I lived in a trailer in Ithaca, New York, I thought unceasingly of that other Ithaca, wine-dark, beset, a place from which to start from, maybe to come home to in some eventuality undreamed of. I cleaned factories for a guy named Ben who wanted to make movies and whom I…
The following excerpts are from Archangel , a hybrid work that takes as its center the unnamed “monster” in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. In Shelley’s book (so very different from the movies) the “monster” learns to read by overhearing cottagers giving lessons to a foreigner. Subsequently he reads many books-including Paradise Lost, Volney’s Ruins of Empire,…
We have smoked all the cigarettes and sold the last pack years ago but I think you’ll thank us once you read the research—that much we took upon ourselves. So, remember: smoking kills. Beware of radiation, mercury and ground-level ozone, and for God’s sakes, wear your seatbelts in whatever kind of wacky cars you make….
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