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…
Sometimes I’ve wondered why it seems happy enough. It hangs around like a meek reminder of smallness, and chirps its slight sound, and flashes its dull brown, in the vague green of summer. And it must think that there in the spread of leaf, where it pauses on a branch, it is hardly ever noticed,…
The argument begins. One voice is overcoming another because it’s had it, it’s had enough of all this shit and, unaccompanied, rises to the edge of screaming and past it till the column of air in that throat has nearly abandoned everything under it. Only the vault of the forehead and the bridge of the…
In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a boy turns into a daffodil, a girl turns into a tree, a husband and wife turn into snakes and slither away together. The fisherman Glaucus, seeing the fish he’s just caught return to life after he’s spread them out on the meadow, eats one of the strange leaves they’re lying on…
In the van we are as corks in water, bobbing, filled with air. Earplugs jam up my ears with the simple fact that a secret music illuminates the window-better from my side of the inside seat, crammed up against a housewife, cow-like from Des Moines with wads of Kleenex in her fist, arriving with Broadway…
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