It was his father’s wedding day. Roland had flown into London the night before and slept at the hotel off Russell Square where he’d stayed during the last days of his mother’s illness. The ceremony, at the parish church near his father’s new house in Suffolk, was set for noon; reception at the house to…
Zacharis Award Ploughshares and Emerson College are pleased to present Elizabeth Gilbert with the ninth annual John C. Zacharis First Book Award for her collection of stories, Pilgrims (Houghton Mifflin, 1997; Mariner, 1998). The $1,500 award — which is named after the college’s former president — honors the best debut book by a Ploughshares writer,…
At the Delano, the flags are flying half-mast, Honoring the workers released from debt and poverty By the death of parents, by murder, freed by inheritance. “We’ve killed them all,” shout the street cleaners Marching through the lobby with bloodstained hands. Chambermaids wrap themselves like brides in the damask drapes, “We poisoned ours, their miserly…
Desire zeroing in on that Furby eBay auction while smut chat gets caught up in the Hegelian carpet role—the secrets of your life scrawled on Post-it notes that fell off of your dash—a pack of Lucky Strikes stairmastered into Liberty’s verdigrised torch— Ellis Island heavier than an oil freighter grounded in…
MASTHEAD Guest Editors Madison Smartt Bell & Elizabeth Spires Editor Don Lee Poetry Editor David Daniel Assistant Editor Gregg Rosenblum Assistant Fiction Editor Maryanne O'Hara Associate Poetry Editor Susan Conley Founding Editor DeWitt Henry Founding Publisher Peter O'Malley Assistant Fiction Editor: Nicole Hein. Editorial Assistants: Hannah Bottomy, Michael Homler, Kat Steiger, and Jean Hopkinson. Poetry…
Sleeping in your Harlem apartment, I lie on the bed by the window to the airshaft, a dark flume cutting the center of the building, a pigeon’s alley from basement to roof. My head on the sill, I stretch my hands out. You’re in the next room at the upright, winning a young composer’s prize….
at my head and my heart, knife-tips green in a gasoline-doused garden. From the tire store behind the house, leering mechanics glaze my window with saliva. I sit at the end of the couch and point my finger angrily, wag it in the face of forever. I sit back on my haunches and sniff the…
Just one of the many delights of putting together this issue of Ploughshares had to do with the sense of discovery I experienced as I came upon submission after submission which challenged, and changed, my notion of the world. However familiar I might have been with the work of my colleagues in Princeton University’s creative…
I. Frigg’s Linchpin Vinyl spinning, midnight pimping in Mick’s gin mill, my lips mining this fish fry, till my thigh minx Iris flits hips with Jimmy. His pigmy mind thinking I’m blind, thinking bilk, grinding his milt digit with Iris’s fig. I’ll chill his smirk, slit his midriff. My fist’s flying, his spit’s flinging. I’m…
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