It all started when Sophie came home from college, between her sophomore and junior years. She wasn’t happy to be back. She’d grown to love Boston, the sad blustery winters, the confusing one-ways and roundabouts, and she felt like she’d outgrown California—its sunny, childlike happiness. Worst of all was her mother. Sophie was an only…
But as we rose from the café table in Trastevere who could not help but notice that it was as beautiful a day as could be imagined in Rome: an early October afternoon in mid-July. There’s little you can’t say against Rome, from the infernal roar to the eternal siestas. There are portents: the coppery-skinned…
Zacharis Award Ploughshares is pleased to present Thomas Sayers Ellis with the sixteenth annual John C. Zacharis First Book Award for his collection of poems, The Maverick Room (Graywolf, 2005). The $1,500 award, which is named after Emerson College’s former president, honors the best debut book by a Ploughshares writer, alternating annually between poetry and…
In the darkness I can see every line of your face. As if you are in my womb. Your fingers feel for its entrance and I am your mother, imagining what you will look like when you are born. When I climb after you into the freshly laundered white duvet, and look at your face…
When I came back from Mexico, I looked like death. My mouth broke down, weather-beaten. I was paying for my sins, my palate had melted. I could touch my brain directly with my tongue. It was painful, terrible, and sweet. While Svetozar was sitting outside, the cabinet of dental instruments was crashing down. I brought…
ANNE ATIK‘s two books of poems are Words in Hock (1974) and Offshore (1991), both from Enitharmon Press. She also authored the memoir How It Was, about her friendship with Samuel Beckett. Other work has appeared in APR, The Partisan Review, Literary Imagination, Pequod, and The Nation, among others. AMY BEEDER‘s first book is Burn…
Old man, why shake a wrinkled prick at the young girls? They scream in harmony, scramble off, and then in mottled light, our eyes meet: you, unbalanced on the hoof of an orthopedic shoe, leaning on a stick, gumming your sly grin back into stubble as with a palsy- humbled hand you try to zip…
Poor white and pining, the full moon coins its antebellum image on a welling tide that rakes the shingle back across the bay. A sight whose sounds summon into mind the muffled ruckus of a million tiny broadcast die caroming off green baize, the bone-clatter by which fate decides the youngest child in a family…
"World is suddener than we fancy it," Louis MacNeice announced in his poem "Snow": "World is crazier and more of it than we think, / Incorrigibly plural . . ." So I felt, collecting the poems and stories for this issue of Ploughshares. The issue was like the great bay window in MacNeice’s poem, with…
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