How Uncle Alvin tumbled from the hayloft, broke his neck. How once a one-armed hobo, a black man, split a half cord of stove wood for a plate of ham, green beans, and fried potatoes, which he ate, slowly, sitting on the grass in the shade of a doomed elm tree. Great-grandma stepped out on…
At the beginning of the process of reading fiction for this issue of Ploughshares, I worried briefly — foolishly — that I might not find enough stories to fill my allotted pages. Now, months later, my single regret is that I didn’t have space for more of the fine work I had the opportunity to…
And then the gray concrete of the subway platform, that shore stripped of all premise of softness or repose. I stood there, beneath the city’s sequential grids and frameworks, its wrappings and unwrappings like a robe sewn with birds that flew into seasons of light, a robe of gold and then a…
“Read me a lesson, Muse, and speak it loud Upon the top of Nevis, blind in mist!” Did Keats sit here or there to write his sonnet? The chasm drops away. Below the air shimmers with auto exhaust and hikers strip off shirts, pinking their backs in the sun. I’ve climbed a shadeless trail sweating…
“Break a board’s good as a rib,” says my teacher, flexing his fists, “—ain’t no rib stayed in one place that long!” My shoulder aches from holding my arm at eye-level. My wrist aches forming a crook. And my fingers and thumb, too, for pinching between them a board, the grains of which slope toward…
He was the yard dog’s yard dog. His heads accessorized with snakes. His tail a scorpion’s, and his slaver, a seed bank for Hell’s herbarium. And his bites were worse than his barks. What did he do in the underworld except to guard the stairs leading away from the bitter tide lap of the Styx?…
Soft, dead rain and raw. Fingers of asparagus halted, dandelions pinched in a slate lace of failed snow, air loaded with undelivered light. Lovely, a pleasure to step back on the weak sod into the last century (old as this one is) behind the whackily settled house, ell and barn to the tipsy, heaved outhouse,…
A woman visits the auto showroom down her street, carefully inspects all the glamorous, unattainable cars, opens the door of an all-white Lincoln convertible and gets in. A salesman with sideburns walks over, says how-do, asks her if she’d like to take it for a spin. “Sure,” she says, and off they…
When the fin of faithlessness appeared I watched it circle, dip, and veer then ride the swells. Where I stood, on shore among the surf-casters’ gear, RVs and 4 x 4’s, I tried to guess where it would rise, sleek bottlenose breaking next, so I might measure the erratic progress that it made beyond the…
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