Maybe it happened as the first long earth-wave rolled through our town. Maybe it was later. We had aftershocks all night. Faith, my wife, wouldn’t sleep inside. No one would but me. Everyone spent the night in the driveways on cots, or on the lawns in sleeping bags, as if this were a neighborhood slumber…
Fei Lo noticed the new clerk right away, a persimmon in a basket of oranges. Three letters on a gold-toned plaque spelled out her name. So as to make no mistake, the old gentleman wrote it in his notebook, fur. He liked to know the names of all the women tellers, as he flirted with…
Cohen Awards Each volume year, the best poem, short story, and nonfiction piece published in Ploughshares are honored with the Cohen Awards. Finalists are nominated by staff editors, and the winners are selected by our advisory editors — comprised of current and former guest editors. Each winner receives a cash prize of $400. The awards…
an ordinary woman leaves her body here when she’s done with it a litterbug she leaves a burden and a warning to us but the dancer’s body is completely gone aah! a jitterbug her soul remains here with us an encouragement what are we supposed to do with it
I am not— opened or closed— what you expected, o heart. Or would you without me have thought to throw open the flooding and roar, to step through the lion’s gold pelt? have thought that the passionate glass is the body? and this life, the one life you wanted? Wanted, meaning neither lacked, nor desired,…
He thinks about the water often: sitting in traffic; in a chair in his office; in bed with his wife, Jeanette, who is now asleep. Together they live the life of the city, Phoenix, where the smog blisters the horizon and the swimming pools are treated by experts. Byron, his brother-in-law, runs a pool cleaning…
I like thinking of the painting chosen for the cover of this issue as a visual representation of our theme of Borderlands. The artist, A. Artidor, is Haitian, contemporary, and not very well-known. My co-editor and I came across it in a Haitian art gallery on the island of Guadeloupe. It is a small (16"…
My father loved her, or rather, wanted her. Gaudy and baubled, with long nut-brown legs, and sun-blazed hair; yes, he wanted her, bad, and the bitch knew it. She was twenty-five, he was fifty-two, I was eleven, mother was dead. The night it happened she was drunk, dinner was over, the dishes were catching flies,…
As if the porous bag had been dipped once, twice, once more in the summer’s water, then set aside. Halfway between sleep and waking, I took it between my lips. And though the earth is everywhere terrible and cruel, the heart diamond flashed out once, twice, and once again the semaphore-reply it cannot help but…
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