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…
The captain said over the loudspeaker, “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Los Angeles. There is no hope.” Each step a search for balance with my friend, here for the first time, beside me in his loose pants and splayfooted saunter, gliding over the sidewalk slabs uprooted by trees or earthquakes on which I’ve stumbled all…
The advice note, dropped on my father’s desk in the first week of September 1955, lay unread for a week. My father was away from home, resolving a dispute over burial sites in Manchester. He was a synagogue troubleshooter, the Red Adair of Anglo-Jewish internecine struggles, and it was his job to travel up and…
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…
They kill them like flies over there he had slurred on the bus full of drunk marines going back to Las Pulgas. Like flies. Corpsmen, he was talking about. Six months later I was a replacement, saw coffins being loaded onto transports on the airstrip coming in. Lived through the first firefight, the second; had…
This time each year nothing stirs. The slow earth clings to its few known elements. Its moon lights only this tenth of the century. Autumn’s madness has left the trees. Winter’s sad mists, too. Between seasons, always waiting on the window’s other side, irregular shadows filter the already fine winds in which a stranger might…
The history of my country is in every link of chains at the foot of Boukman’s copper statue overlooking a dusty town at the depth of despair with candlelights of anger burning in every tired palm. Low black clouds converted light into darkness, the man with a fat cigar stands in front of the black…
Going south on 91 after a storm, black ice on a bridge. The car skids. Stars above and below, headlights in fog moving down the hill ahead. The grip of tires and pavement and I breathe again. I am like the man who lives beside a stream all his life, and on the day he…
For so long the hillside shone white, the white of white branches laden, the sky more white, the river unmoved. And when the first stirrings started underneath, the hollowing subtle, unpredictable, rotten crust gave way— ice water up to the ankle! She turned from her work and shook her wet foot. The buds had broken….
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