John C. Zacharis Award Ploughshares is pleased to present Aleksandar Hemon with the eleventh annual John C. Zacharis Award for his collection of stories, The Question of Bruno (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2000; Vintage, 2001). The $1,500 award — which is named after Emerson College’s former president — honors the best debut book by a Ploughshares writer,…
To the loft and to them I came to be the opiate, not the administered, fiending to become the body without self, reversible as a jacket, Able Was I Ere I Saw Elba, as the trompe l’oeil in Psych remaining two faces human, the Queen and her Consort, seen from another…
The horse, Susan said, because it is the blankest of slates, or because our success—our genes’ successes—are linked, has been written on extensively by our needs. Dumb giants pawing the ground, father, mother, escape, sexuality glistening and rippling, forelock and fetlock, footloose and fearless, or the pleasures of the fearful—fleeing the sudden gesture, careening through…
A wing’s a bridge made of light and lightness. Such an unattaching, then then, such a humming garden. What is finished is brutal. Pink swallow, brown wings and tail acock on a porcelain vase, can be diving so, only if whole is the greenest color. Return, world. Be a little whether….
The goddess of the hunt is not herself. She is tired having waited, having sniffed around surgically. All her arrows jiggle with nothingness, so she turns herself inside out: her tongue is a tail, her throat a torso, her stomach bundled with eyes and claws. She feels, on her cheek, a new weather. Angels drift…
If you materialize this thing, which is a lamp, which is a cup, as practice. If you light it, if you drink from it. Although the long day is still ahead, you may behave in the dark as you do in the dark. The light won’t find you out, it will make room, it…
Since they left Houston that summer, Hugh and his mother had traveled in a long, slow circuit as far north as Amarillo, then worked their way down through El Paso and San Antonio and Austin, seeing sights Hugh had no desire to see, and in which he doubted his mother had any real interest, either….
Then we want to drown or sing To skip ahead as if lost in the past When I say we I mean everything all at once When I say forever Each of us counts our desires And the desire to gather Fills our hearts We create the simplest words We live alone in absolute silence…
I cannot tell you the whole story because the whole story will not fit in my mouth. I have always had a small mouth, small tongue, tiny lungs. If I were to try to tell the whole story, I might expire. All over you, and you in your best black robes. It’s like trying to…
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