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Cohen Awards Each volume year, we honor the best poem, short story, and essay 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 are selected by our advisory editors. Each winner receives a cash prize of…
A faint afterglow of red behind the hills, and the tops of the pine trees are all mist and woodsmoke now. Up the darkening headwaters of a little trib, the swifts give way to bats. Nobody’s going to find you, no one is even looking. Time measured in the tick of insects against the screened-in…
This morning a hawk plunges straight for the squirrel at my feeder and leaves only its signature: blood on the snow. All morning it circled the yard, then dove, stunning itself on the glass sky of my window, and in minutes returned, braving the thin, perilous channel between hedgerow and house. I was watching its…
MASTHEAD Guest Editor Ann Beattie Editor Don Lee Poetry Editor David Daniel Associate Editor Jessica Dineen Assistant Editor Jodee Stanley Founding Editor DeWitt Henry Founding Publisher Peter O'Malley Editorial Assistant: Maryanne O'Hara. Fiction Readers: Billie Lydia Porter, Michael Rainho, Karen Wise, Robin Troy, Stephanie Booth, Loretta Chen, Barbara Lewis, Will Morton, Joseph Connolly, Kevin Supples,…
In the end, I made myself known to your wife as a god would, in her own house, in Ithaca, a voice without a body: she paused in her weaving, her head turning first to the right, then left though it was hopeless of course to trace that sound to any objective source: I doubt…
A secret like a lodestar, a ball of pure lead, I thought about tasting him long enough for a life to wither, a new planet to come into view. I imagined the smell of his genitals, so common, so indescribable. Wyoming and summer. Thunderheads galloping in a stark yellow light. Or puffball clouds white as…
The six stories in this issue speak for themselves — forcefully, lucidly — and whatever I might say about them is irrelevant to their value as literature. The very notion of an “introduction,” at least in this context, strikes me as peculiar to the brink of weird. A good story introduces itself, stakes its own…
A bird comes to the window. It’s a mistake to think of them as birds, they are so often messengers. That is why, once they plummet to the sill, they sit so perfectly still, to mock patience, lifting their heads to sing poor lady, poor lady, their three-note warning, later flying like a dark cloud…
Drought summer I broke my foot and hobbled on crutches. Stood staring, crutches against the counter, refrigerator door open, blank light spilling. Your mother, all hours, weeping upstairs, her widow’s heart splitting her chest apart. Home after nine, or later, vacant as a ghost, you would swallow me with a hot mouth, grime visible on…
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