When the dove of whom there is no memory fell into the sea We were uncreated, oh yeah, we were speechless before the sky. There were no words to be sung on the water without edges. Lord had shown his preference for his serpents and his mosses. Into depths we drowned, the familial and…
Your daffodils rose up and collapsed in their yellow bodies on the hillside garden above the brick patio you laid out in sand, squatting with pants pegged and face masked like a beekeeper’s against the black flies. Buttercups circle the planks of the old wellhead, bright boisterous convergence, this May while your silken gardener’s body…
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…
MASTHEAD Guest Editor Richard Ford Editor Don Lee Poetry Editor David Daniel Assistant Editor Jodee Stanley Founding Editor DeWitt Henry Founding Publisher Peter O'Malley Editorial Assistants: Heidi Pitlor, Maryanne O'Hara, and Nathaniel Bellows. Interns: Paul Reilly and Monique Hamzé. Fiction Readers: Billie Lydia Porter, Emily Doherty, Anne Kriel, Karen Wise, John Rubins, Craig Salters, Loretta…
A knot of string, crossed sticks, a dab of ink— can’t any work begin as a passionate doodling? So here is another of his constructions: a wooden cow, but so skillful even the bull was tricked. You see, one must reckon with the jaded boredom of queens. During the drawn-out days, she lusted …
I love to find a door. Like the spinal tap— above the draped fetal curve, you work the trocar inwards. Dowser, boatman, auger, bore. Every surface has its opening, even bone. Steel finds fossa, penetrates. That give, as the needle enters dura. Slide out the central metal filament, it rings, and the invisible emerges, drop…
According to the stories my mother tells, I refused to speak a word until I was almost four. She became so worried that she took me to a doctor — an extreme act in the rural Kentucky region where I was raised; in fact, for the remainder of my Kentucky youth, I would never see…
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