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Introduction: Postcard from New York
Postcard from New York February 2002 It’s a different city now, this New York, the city my wife and I love (and choose) to live in, a new shorthand can be heard for time and location: “The Event,” “The 11th,” “The Pile.” For weeks after, on the way to rehearsals for a play of mine…
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Sons of God
“All this,” said Wayne the plumber, “was written down in the Bible five thousand years ago.” He was out on the deck taking a break from doing angioplasty on the pipes beneath my kitchen sink. Meanwhile, he was giving his assistant, John Pickles, a lesson. “Hey, Wayne,” I yelled from an upstairs window, “you’re wrong…
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Inheritance of Waterfalls and Sharks
for my son, Klemente Gilbert-Espada In 1898, with the infantry from Illinois, the boy who would become the poet Sandburg rowed his captain’s Saint Bernard ashore at Guánica, and watched as the captain lobbed cubes of steak at the canine snout. The troops speared mangos with bayonets like many suns thudding with shredded yellow flesh…
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Your Borders, Your Rivers, Your Tiny Villages
At two o’clock in the morning, no one is to blame. We’d been watching CNN, one scene of disaster leading to the next, the reporter in front of what might have been a new anthrax outbreak giving way to the military analyst in the studio with new developments in Kabul, when William put his hand…
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Julie Orringer and Caroline Finkelstein, Cohen Awards
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…
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A Postcard from Okemah
Turned from the camera’s eye, hovering, between river & bridge, the hung woman looks downstream, & snagged in the air beside her, the body of her young son. They are tassels on a drawn curtain; they are the closed eyes of the black boy who will find them while leading his cow to the riverbank;…
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The High Road
My whole life, it always made me crazy when people weren’t sensible. Dancers, for instance, have the worst eating habits. I can’t begin to say how many anorexic little girls I used to have to hold up onstage, afraid they were going to faint on me any minute. I myself was lean and tight and…
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Introduction
Last autumn I found myself talking about my new novel at a fundraiser for a college library. Only after I’d committed to doing this did I discover that I was following a man who had written a popular book about the human genome project and preceding a woman who had written about recent war crimes….