Zacharis Award Ploughshares and Emerson College are pleased to present Kevin Young with the sixth annual John C. Zacharis First Book Award for his poetry collection, Most Way Home, published by William Morrow. The $1,500 award — which is funded by Emerson College and named after the college’s former president — honors the best debut…
This was the first Thanksgiving with my wife’s family, sitting at the stained pine table in the dining room. The wood stove coughed during her mother’s prayer: Amen and the gravy boat bobbing over fresh linen. Her father stared into the mashed potatoes and saw a white battleship floating in the gravy. Still staring at…
In the ambulance a child is turning blue around the edges. The sweep of time has lifted up her life and we are a blur of hands trying to refasten her to it. Two fingers press a rhythm on her birdcage chest. The muscle clenched inside has a hole too wide. Time sweeps by like…
MASTHEAD Guest Editors Robert Boswell & Ellen Bryant Voigt Editor Don Lee Poetry Editor David Daniel Assistant Editors Susan Conley & Jodee Stanley Assistant Fiction Editor Maryanne O'Hara Founding Editor DeWitt Henry Founding Publisher Peter O'Malley Editorial Assistants: Matt Stark, Jessica Olin, Heidi Pitlor, and Nathaniel Bellows. Fiction Readers: Billie Lydia Porter, Craig Salters, Monique…
8. Two Girls That day I reached and swept the flies from the face of a Vietnamese girl on the bed of a pickup truck, until I realized she was dead and stopped, is the day I will never forget. Of all days, that is the day. They crowded her eyes, until her eyes were…
Now that the fields belong to the crows and the dark rolls in on a cart with supper, we thicken the skin of the house, tuck a caterpillar of hay, a reverse moat, around the foundation. Half the crickets in Conway died last night under cold rocks—or do they all go at once, once chain…
The crossroads is a real place between imaginary places — points of departure and arrival. It is also a place where negotiations and deals are made with higher powers. In the West African and Haitian traditions of Legba, it is a sanctified place of reflection (mirrors are used in symbolic travel). The crossroads is a…
Swept to the bank of the Ganges, what seemed to be charred wood were flies clustering a child. A sin to push it in the water? I wasn’t sure, and left the face to its slow dissolve. It took hours walking home, dust darkening my feet to the sandals’ leather. Perhaps the mynah birds would…
You can’t abandon me now when I’m dead and need tenderness. —Zbigniew Herbert I. Cut Photograph: 1941 My mother cared most about beauty. Its absence hurt her like sickness, like loss of life. So she cut the photograph where I ride on my father’s shoulders at that place on his chest below the heart where…
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