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  • Fraternity

    Cal used to be president of their fraternity. But then he was in a car wreck. Cal and Hap and a group of boys from the fraternity house had been out to the bars, and they were on their way home. Afterward Hap often pictured Cal dipping his hand into a cooler of beer, letting…

  • Richard McCann, Cohen Award

    The 1992 Denise and Mel Cohen Awards for the outstanding poem, short story, and nonfiction published in Ploughshares Volume 17 Each of these awards carries a prize of $400 and is made possible through the generosity of Denise and Mel Cohen of New Orleans. The Cohen Awards are nominated and judged by the advisory and…

  • The Backyard

    I The lemon tree splatters a lacy shadow over the hot grass. A main bough gave out five years ago under the weight of fruit the size of croquet balls, which should have been picked but wasn't (there are just so many things you can do with lemons). The scar from the missing limb is…

  • Cadet Barnes Learns the System

    The Stratton Military School for Boys is a quadrangle surrounded by low buildings, surrounded by a stone wall, surrounded by the mountains of north central Pennsylvania. The school is on a hillside above the white clapboard houses of the nearby town. It is a steep slope, the kind where kids might go sledding in winter….

  • Eileen Pollack, Cohen Award

    The 1992 Denise and Mel Cohen Awards for the outstanding poem, short story, and nonfiction published in Ploughshares Volume 17 Each of these awards carries a prize of $400 and is made possible through the generosity of Denise and Mel Cohen of New Orleans. The Cohen Awards are nominated and judged by the advisory and…

  • Photograph From Antietam

    “Dead Confederate Solder” —Gardner, Catalog #554 Around him is battlefield litter, dew-swollen lumps of a spilled powder. What is it? And the strips of cloth. Left behind the lines of men that advanced or fell farther on or hid somehow on this trampled field of Maryland grass. By chance, at the extreme upper edge of…

  • Woman on a Plane

    for Marie She was in her thirties, a poet, and she was afraid to fly. Her brother was dying in another city. She did not have a husband or children, but she had a job that held her in the city where she lived. Until her brother went home to die, her job was work…

  • Dan Wakefield, Cohen Award

    The 1992 Denise and Mel Cohen Awards for the outstanding poem, short story, and nonfiction published in Ploughshares Volume 17 Each of these awards carries a prize of $400 and is made possible through the generosity of Denise and Mel Cohen of New Orleans. The Cohen Awards are nominated and judged by the advisory and…

  • Before Groundbreak

    Off work and going upslope for a look I left the plans—to see the view Their money bought—weighted with a rock, And trampled a path of parted weeds Past pampas, nettles, Poison oak bristling in the breeze, A weathered two-by-four nailed high up in a cedar's fork, A haggard pair of panties waving stiffly from…