Along the strand stones, busted shells, wood scraps, bottle tops, dimpled and stainless beer cans. Something began here a century ago, a nameless disaster, perhaps a voyage to the lost continent where I was born. Now the cold winds of March dimple the gray, incoming waves. I kneel on the wet earth looking for a…
MASTHEAD Guest Editor Heather McHugh Editor Don Lee Poetry Editor David Daniel Assistant Editor Gregg Rosenblum Associate Fiction Editor Maryanne O'Hara Associate Poetry Editor Susan Conley Founding Editor DeWitt Henry Founding Publisher Peter O'Malley Assistant Fiction Editors: Jay Baron Nicorvo and Nicole Kelley. Editorial Assistants: Thomas Fabian and Michele Stella. Poetry Readers: Sean Singer, Ellen…
And who could play it well enough If deaf and dumb and blind with love? —Yeats Let’s not pretend we could be less complicated than millions before us. Let’s be just friends, be Platonic, only look at the bottoms of each other’s feet, or skin on inner forearms, where the sun has done almost no…
DeWitt Henry (without whom there would be no Ploughshares) running the magazine out of his Brookline Street, Cambridge, apartment, a book-crammed fifth-floor walkup, and later from a storefront next to a pizza shop on Waverley Avenue, Watertown: DeWitt, who kept the faith and wrote the grant proposals and answered the mail and talked endlessly of…
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…
1. That the wandering would be the more-favored part, this was unexpected, exceptional. Even the gnaw of the harness, faces shawled against the dust, nights without fire—sweet to him now— even this. Who could find that point again, at the canvas steppes where exhaustion forced them on into the serrated mouths of grass rather than…
Quadruple bypass: yes, he had it. What happens next is anybody’s guess. After the surgeon’s pre-op visit he pulled the tubes and needles out, got dressed and stalked outside to smoke a cigarette. The surgeon threatened not to operate. Old heart, old curmudgeon, old genius, terrified old man who more than anyone knows form is…
Cosmologists, epic poets, holy men in exile— They all found their way to the illustrious library. All lovers of knowledge were welcome to a niche In that bristling hush, no matter how shaggy or ragged. There were the usual cynics and the inevitable stoics. Some were sages without honor, scrawling out summas In their mongrel…
Two Italians painted on both sides of the grand marble staircase in the Scuola di San Rocco—The Plague. The great equalizer. In this democracy of the dead, a woman and her baby are flung over a pallet on wheels, a man with sinews and massive calves pushes them, and it could be almost tender how…
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