Cohen Awards Each year, we honor the best short story and poem 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 2006…
A soup on the tray. The tray is heavy. The bowl and the spoon. The tray is heavy. A husband in the bed. The bed and the coughing. The bowl and the spoon, the tray and husband. At the window the snow a soup on the tray. The soup, it is heavy. The spoon and…
laylah ali was born in 1968 in Buffalo, New York. She graduated from Williams College and received her M.F.A. in painting from Washington University in St. Louis. Her exhibitions include solo shows at the 303 Gallery in New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. She lives in…
Diane holds the map in her hands and turns it counterclockwise. She notices how awful her dry, broken thumbnails look, and she tilts the palms of her hands upward to conceal them. "This is the park where we were dropped off, so I think we are here somewhere." Diane taps Zhonglu Road with her index…
Everybody has their mean days. You live in a light blue turtleneck, park dirt, roller skate patch, little monkey in a shirt. The busted-up driveway. Triumphant soap music from the window and there down the road a bowlegged grandpa who wants to help with your project. You sit on the tailgate and watch, bored, poking…
At the very northern edge of the Soviet Union, just west of the Kara Sea, there’s a city called Dickson, which is exactly the spot I used to focus on on the map on my bedroom wall when I was trying to fall asleep. By the time I was twelve the map had been moved…
It turned out there was another mother at my son’s nursery school whose father had killed himself. I learned this when I came back to Boston, ten days after my father died. I dropped my son off at the school and watched as he darted off, quick as a released minnow, into the space that…
The stick the dog drags writes a poem in the snow along the railroad tracks. Is it my life she’s writing in a long, slow cursive already half-buried by fresh snow? There, written in a winter forest, lies my story, for anyone to read.
Clare can’t walk. She has sprained her ankle so badly, it’s no better than broken. Marble step, wet leaf, a moment of distraction, and she was pulled up, several feet above the landing and dropped like a bag of laundry, her fingers sliding down the wet iron banister, her feet bending and flopping like…
No products in the cart.