Ploughshares is pleased to present E. K. Ota with the fifth annual Ashley Leigh Bourne Prize for Fiction for her short story “The Paper Artist,” which appeared in the Fall 2022 issue, edited by Editor-in-chief Ladette Randolph. The $2,500 prize, sponsored by longtime patron Hunter C. Bourne III and selected by our editors, honors a…
I’m early again, so I sit idling in the parking lot, watching the young boys shoot baskets through the chain-link fence. My windows are open with the AC blowing at my knees on low. I just want to feel the wind on my face, but I can’t stand this heat right now, not when I’m…
She was seven and having her bacon and orange juice in the kitchen on North Kings Road in West Hollywood. Behind her and above the sink the jalousies were angled open. Outside were palm and hibiscus and there was weather. You could hear it. She looked at me and stopped chewing. Me at that age…
After you betray him, you will try to explain yourself. You will sit at his computer, the one he fell into and never returned, and you will stare at the screen inches from your face, but your fingertips will hover above the very keyboard he could never leave and you will feel like the woman…
Circa 1960, in an early recording with La Sonora Matancera, Cuban songstress Celia Cruz belts out a street vendor’s tongue-twister offering candy by the kilo. Los traigo de coco y piña, de limón y miel de abeja. I’ve got coconut and pineapple, lemon and bees’ honey. De piña para las niñas y los de miel…
1. It’s usually a lone figure, backlit so as to seem anonymous and therefore universal, because if we don’t know who a person is, we’re more likely to think it could be us. No one seemed to consider the animosity of strangers or the threat we might associate with the unknown. The people are poised…
My husband’s sister calls at mealtimes. Paul leaves the table and takes the call in the study, even if we’ve just sat down to dinner. At one time I would have waited for him—ten minutes or an hour, however long it took Tara to outline the parameters of her latest calamity. Tonight I keep eating….
It was not evening-out jewelry, not twice-a-year jewelry. She slept in it. She always said when she died I would have it but almost certainly never pictured me wearing it: how it would lie an inch below my beard, in the hollow between my clavicles, how the serpentine chain would catch stray hairs on my…
When they started calling, we were alert to names of friends/not friends joining the cult of fear?/not fear? Free to drink, smoke, swear but not free to carry the self-same guilt; some lesser god, held less accountable— Two women breed tragedy; two men plot. To live like a man—dash, dash it all. It’s so much…
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