Each day she woke before dawn and walked the grounds of the American hospital. She didn’t go far. She kept to the footpaths that encircled the main hall, past the evergreens and the timber cottages now used as additional wards for the wounded. It had once been a Japanese vocational school for the arts, and…
I’d sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk… —Robinson Jeffers The squirrels are up to their nuts in pecans, And the largesse of the trees Has made them careless in their comings and goings, Their carryings and buryings. Every few blocks there’s one Who zigged just when he should have zagged;…
Perhaps the purpose of leaves is to conceal the verticality of trees which we notice in December as if for the first time: row after row of dark forms yearning upwards. And since we will be horizontal ourselves for so long, let us now honor the gods of the vertical: stalks of wheat which to…
Fall 2007 KAREN E. BENDER is the author of the novel Like Normal People (Houghton Mifflin). Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Zoetrope, Ploughshares, The Best American Short Stories, and The Pushcart Prize. She is co-editor of the forthcoming anthology Choice (Macadam Cage), and teaches creative writing at the University of North…
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…
This is my father bent like a Michelangelo prophet over a tray of spore, showing me how to pour boiling water over the soil to eradicate fungi, etc. I stand beside him ignoring his lecture. Instead watch steam from his coffee cup curl into the blue of the tubular daylight bulbs. This is my brother…
after Rilke It’s time, Lord. The summer was so immense. Now on the sundials your shadows stretch their lengths And across the meadows you release the winds. Command the last fruits to swell with life, Grant them still a few days of florid sun, Press them to completion, and like a hunter Chase the fleeting…
I want to send out this issue of Ploughshares in the high spirits of a Saturday morning in late March. I was alone and took a long walk by myself, but I also carried with me this surprising gathering of writers, this sudden congregation of solitaries, some from different countries, a few no longer living….
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