I need you to tell the truth, to tell the mean stories, and to sing the song of hope. —Dorothy Allison, Skin What I remember, mostly, is the orange tag. It had no place for a name—just er visitor printed in sharp uppercase letters, so that’s who I became. For three days, I hid…
If, in William Penn’s words, America was “a good poor Man’s country” and remained the dream of a promised land for Europe’s impoverished up to the beginning of the twentieth century, it is no less true that this goodness depended to a considerable degree on black misery. —Hannah Arendt. On a steamy August day,…
After their appointment with the speech therapist, Carmela set her four-year-old grandson, Lucas, in front of a Jesus cartoon with a baggie of Cheddar Bunnies. He slumped against the couch cushion, exhausted from his tongue and mouth exercises, eyes glazed. Her son-in-law, Jonah—who’d lived with her since her daughter’s death three years ago—would be irritated,…
It was Rashmi Sahota’s third day back in the office, and though she felt clammy, she also felt rejuvenated—at least in spirit. Staff at the care service observed the Wednesday morning with the faint effort given to Friday afternoons. The phones were silent, so banter lingered longer than usual, and a mindless conversation over whether…
In the West, we have always prepared for the big one. We affixed bookcases and dressers to the walls, Velcro, L-brackets, anchors butterflied behind the sheetrock. In the guts of the houses where we could not see, hurricane straps butted joists to larger timber, the bracket named for another disaster but effective also for ours….
We are the children of Cavan. Do you know of that place? It is a border town, betwixt and between, a place of cross roads— and yet strangely few pass by there. The land around is low and sodden, a place of scrub and straggly pines, lanes and paths leading nowhere. The damp comes up…
Ploughshares is pleased to present Mario Alberto Zambrano with the ninth annual Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction for his short story “Some of You,” which appeared in the Spring 2019 issue, guest-edited by Rigoberto González. The $2,500 prize, sponsored Alice Hoffman, acclaimed writer, former guest editor, longtime patron, and member of the Ploughshares advisory board,…
One evening early in the new year, my ten-year-old confided that she was worried about something. Between the demands of school and the dynamics of friends, let alone all the changes dawning around and within her, I wasn’t surprised to learn she might be nervous about something. But her fear caught me off guard. “I’m…
Edward Hirsch, Stranger by Night (Knopf, February 2020).
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