When I decided to ask Recita Holguin to marry me, I visited my confessor, The Bishop, in his place of banishment. He is not a bishop now, but he was once. “Red!” he said. “Red!” And he hugged me close, his cheek and ear pressed hard against my chest. He stepped back, and raised up…
Say I’m a man of fifty-three years, flexible in my thinking, yet shaped by certain heavily reinforced concepts about my relationship with the world. Say I’m someone who cannot speak seriously for long without blurting a phrase, some winking word curve that proclaims I’m ready to ride pleasure all the way to reverence. Okay, I’m…
After Kirs in tall glasses at the Café Dupon, we roamed the cobblestone streets, each storefront window a stage, empty save for its props and the dark behind them. A boulangerie every block, five blocks to the bus stop. He’d persuade me to drive in his Peugeot, a silver compact stick shift. Angers at night,…
Yesterday, another dog collapsed, this one endlessly carrying slippers and bones. If I don’t leave here now, I’ll die here, the ascent to town less than one hour and my car headed Away, but stalled, surrounding temperature so extreme my skin can’t distinguish winter, summer. In just one hour: carrots for sight, beets for blood,…
I grew up in Garden City, a small Pennsylvania community where my brother, Adrian, and I were the only Jews in our elementary school. I got along better with the kids than Adrian, played sports and made friends more easily, but still I had my troubles. One day I went into Mrs. Nick’s-short for Nicodemus-a…
I keep seeing him as the tiny chill of sound rising out of a black groove, this record and its mist of scratches, and imagine it would have pleased him, to think he could escape this planet alive. Or the other notion, how he is more needle than sound, that a piece of him lies…
Cohen Awards Each volume 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…
It happened like this: he lived in a palace which was also a prison. You understand how nothing is ever simple. He had built a labyrinth for the king’s monster son, a great service, which came with a secret. One for the king, one in the builder’s head. Be reasonable, could the king ever…
I call my father on the phone it’s twenty years today My mother died and his life turned sorry And he’s filing his fishing hooks smoothing down the barbs He’s going to throw back every bass in Minnesota When Grandfather died death stood way over there In a gray sharkskin suit directing the mourners When…
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