Midwinter you can see past the trees, white oaks and tulip poplars, tops golden in the low sun. Today, not a cloud. The old fireroad leads up Old Raggedy, up to boulders and the sheer outcrop silver with snowmelt. What matters lasts a long time: rock, timber, streambeds with predicaments where the water falls. But…
Day off in dark suit & hat, looking though the viewfinder of a new eight-millimeter Bell & Howell camera, paying no mind the open windows, the seizure. Just how more than half the targets on the grassy knoll are potential customers, models, women, how accident & aim could fit them all, including the car, into…
My first thought in editing this issue of Ploughshares was to put together a collection of autobiographical and fictional writings that tested the border between those preposterously rough groupings. And the very first piece that crossed my desk, Susan Bergman's "Imago," confirmed me in this intention. "Imago" is a brilliant family portrait whose narrator claims…
MASTHEAD Guest Editor Tobias Wolff Executive Director DeWitt Henry Managing Editor & Fiction Editor Don Lee Poetry Editor Joyce Peseroff Office Manager Renee Rooks Assistant Fiction Editor Debra Spark Founding Publisher Peter O'Malley Staff Assistant: Phillip Carson. Assistant Proofreader: Holly LeCraw Howe. Fiction Readers: Billie Lydia Porter, Karen Wise, Sara Nielsen Gambrill, Phillip Carson, Holly…
I dream of a crowded street where I break A kiss into your mouth; instead my windows Are darkened with curtains and in fear I want to hide you, your sigh, my hand Cupping your fast breath so those who walk by Will not hear. We do even this honest thing Wrong and lie down…
Kennedy Playground Washington, D.C. We forced our faces into the circular frame a stringless hoop made, hoping more than silence & light would fall through. We fought for position. We fouled & shoved. We high-fived God. Our Converse All-Stars burned enough rubber to rival The Devil & his mama. Hoop, horseshoe, noose. We aimed at…
When we ran out of money, the paintings worked like magic. My father would take one down from the pair of nails it hung on and would carry it-his face close to the portrait's face-to his creditor's car. He told the few facts he had been told about the artist's life, a name changed from…
Tobias Wolff was born in Alabama in 1945 and grew up in the Pacific Northwest. He is the author of the short novel The Barracks Thief, which won the 1985 PEN/Faulkner Award; two collections of short stories, Back in the World and In the Garden of the North American Martyrs, which received the Saint Lawrence…
your open legs a tree where I leave messages like a failed monk with new prayers waiting it out in the small clearing to stay in wilderness without trembling to lean into a covenant of branches no one can redeem the part of lying awake near your offered wrist yet I might split you with…
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