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Zacharis Award Winner Richard McCann

ZACHARIS FIRST BOOK AWARD Ploughshares is pleased to present Richard McCann with the fifteenth annual John C. Zacharis First Book Award for his collection of stories, Mother of Sorrows (Pantheon, 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 fiction…

Blue

I stand there under the high limbs of locust watching my father point a black gun into the air his arms steepled for the stillness required to split the proverbial hair with a BB. I would like to throw a red hat to catch what will smack from the barrel but instead the songbird drops…

My Life

after the Gawain poet Like Jonas by the fish was I received by it, swung and swept in the dark waters, driven to the deeps by it and beyond many rocks; the winds on the one water wrestled together. Without any touching of its teeth I tumbled into it and without more struggle than a…

Prophecy

No waste of shame, no wilting of the flower, the stick shall not break, the bat shall not splinter, no friend will wake, no end of winter; nor remembrance of splendor to counter the paper bull’s power will cover the lake with ice when gamblers spill the dice: the mirror shall not tilt, the quick…

Cheap Fiction

I’d read the book before but when the building blew up I found myself drawn in again. I knew the wife would yell, “Oh,” as her husband fell. There would be the blackness of the night and the way the world becomes a gray swirl before our eyes. I picked up a section of orange…

Flamenco Vignettes

translated by Ralph Angel to Manuel Torres, “Niño de Jerez,” who has the body of a Pharaoh Portrait of Silverio Franconetti Between Italian and flamenco, how would that Silverio have sung? The thick honey of Italy, mixed with our lemon, flowed through the deep wail of his siguiriya. His cry was terrifying. The old folk…

Leather Boys

They lived in town, in houses that touched, houses that needed paint, and money for the rent. We never talked of their parents. We didn’t know their families, what they did on Sundays. They were the boys our mothers feared, alien boys, and we the moths drawn to their light. They were the boys who…