MASTHEAD Guest Editors Howard Norman & Jane Shore 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: Darla Bruno, Gregg Rosenblum, and Tom Herd. Poetry Readers: Paul Berg, Brian Scales, Michael Henry, Renee Rooks, Charlotte Pence, R. J….
A piece of paper Which appeared to be blank But on which we see Writing had faded. “My first is of the Possessive of those Given to possession. And my last, the finality Of that proposition. In entirety I give That which in three worlds doth live. Ungainly in the two; In all, long-legged beauty,…
At this distance, from the other shore, looking across the river north and east, you just can’t tell what kind of trees they are, feathered in those ideal humid greens in a sort of flow toward the horizon and the ocean. In perspective they diminish to depletion, into the sunset’s haw and haze, as if…
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…
Antonia’s midwifed for centuries turning bloody breeches to the ripening light. Their heads wash up to the sun. Light’s trapped here, and the shore’s decor is silky and pink-veined. Trumpets, periwinkles, cockles, gorgeous mouths of pain. And babies roll deliciously on this packed-down beach. Once she ground her luminescent stones with herbs—charms for new pain….
Today you’re going to hike to the very end Of this steep valley, where the path rises And disappears beyond the waterfall Marked on the yellow sign you saw last night Before you went to sleep to dream of today. Now, as you yawn here on the balcony Of the chalet, you hear distant cowbells….
“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…
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…
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