A spacious night, the ward quiet but for a male nurse humming Klezmer music to your roommate, an elderly Polish widow suffering in body only, her roofless mind deluged by grace as the first priest to orbit Earth administers extreme unction to New York City, its helium balloon of Christ punctured beyond repair and dying…
—James Michael Maguire, 1953–1980 Jimmy’s grave is flat and nothing in the cemetery grove of fat maples blowing electric green not a mile from the river wind blowing like the background sound of highspeed tires on the highway not far away nearby toy trucks and a two-month-old’s grave playing dead but it’s Jimmy I found…
Howard Norman, The Museum Guard, a novel: Norman’s third novel is an exquisite tale set in Halifax just before World War II. DeFoe Russett, orphaned at age eight, lives in a hotel and works as a museum guard with his uncle. DeFoe begins a tormenting affair with Imogen Linny, the caretaker of a small Jewish…
The early sun is so pale and shadowy, I could be looking up at a ghost in the shape of a window, a tall, rectangular spirit looking down at me in bed, about to demand that I avenge the murder of my father. But the morning light is only the first line in the play…
A leaf falls in high wind and drifts along a path unfolding by simple rules: rise away from heat, sink toward cold. I’ll claim this mirage forming in the heat field tinged the reluctant blue of made belief. Move rapidly toward the rising heat. After an odd juke, the leaf, drained, pauses on a stone…
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…
There is a section in my library for death and another for Irish history, a few shelves for the poetry of China and Japan, and in the center a row of imperturbable reference books, the ones you can turn to anytime, when the night is going wrong or when the day is full of empty…
When I closed my eyes I thought about playing tennis with him a long time ago on the deserted court, a mile from the ocean. And the rallies that lasted a long time. While the overhead clouds drifted like gulls. Thought not so much about him as the field of us. The sun-embalmed afternoons…
Jesus began to say unto the multitudes concerning John, What went ye out into the wilderness to see? A reed shaken with the wind? . . . But what went ye out for to see? A prophet? Yea, I say unto you, and more than a prophet. —Matthew 11: 7–9 There’s always something sepulchral…
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