MASTHEAD Guest Editor Lorrie Moore Editor Don Lee Poetry Editor David Daniel Associate Editor Susan Conley Assistant Fiction Editor Maryanne O'Hara Founding Editor DeWitt Henry Founding Publisher Peter O'Malley Editorial Assistants: Gregg Rosenblum, Amy King, Samantha Myers, and Tom Herd. Fiction Readers: Scott Clavenna, Monique Hamzé, Tammy Zambo, Emily Doherty, Leah Stewart, Michael Rainho, Andrea…
I knew a force lay hidden in the air that could raise this heat from only a spark, lick the sky and still be hungry. I lit a page of rolled up news and ran out back with arm upraised and stuck it under. It didn’t catch at first. I threw a cup of diesel…
We need centuries of them. You wake up late in the morning, the dark wind flowing through you, and all day long it is the only thing that makes sense: wind, that slides a hand under your boots on the pavement and carries; wind, that slices at the lips and cuts. In it we listen…
In a brief introduction to the last issue of Ploughshares I guest-edited (Spring 1985, Vol. 11, No. 1), I noted that nearly twelve years had passed since the first issue I edited (Summer 1973, Vol. 1, No. 4) and that I’d be happy to do it again in another dozen years or so. Blink: a…
You came down to me in the hollow after work. I was reaping my just desert of overcommitting myself this March to too many taps. I was resting for a while on a stump, listening to the steady drip of sap in the pails. You were dressed in a skirt and purple blouse,…
1. Today I walk, find countless calla lilies. How anything grows its own perfect white and stays that way—unafraid of world. It is lovely, so I look. It doesn’t matter what it thinks of me. 2. This is what I’ve been given to look at. I never chose to be here— California gardens, riches. There…
Beatrice needed a new liver. Her old one had succumbed to damage suffered in a fall one month earlier from the top of a seven-story parking garage. She lay in a coma while the hospital prepared for her imminent transplant, but she was not asleep. That part of her which was not her broken body…
When it becomes possible to sleep with his brother’s wife, George Norgaard jumps at the chance. He has in fact been wanting to sleep with her for years: he’s spied on her at picnics, at Christmas, and once years ago they kissed too long-but nothing like this. Now they meet in hotels, in bars, at…
He showed me brochures for the last moment of my life. He had done an elaborate makeup job on his wrists, so it would look as if he had tried to commit suicide. He gave me a ring, bright as the eyes of a child on a stupid church trip. Our families threw advice at…
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