To celebrate twenty years of Ploughshares is to celebrate the idea of our revolving editorship, a series of guest-edited issues directed and moderated by the magazine's staff, with each issue and guest editor speaking to others in the progress of the series. For this issue, with the assistance of Don Lee, our managing editor/associate fiction…
He was to arrive at San Francisco, a six-year-old boy flying from China alone for twenty hours. We went there to meet him, hoping he still remembered us, since he had not seen us for three years. We waited patiently at the airport, till all passengers came through the customs. Did he miss the plane?…
He's nervy, speaking through my voice while enjoying both sunshine and shade on the same safe street. Is he hiding behind that laughing tree? No. He could be farther away. A stranger approaches me on the street with a rose, let's say, or a message from someone back home. I'll accept the message or the…
On the plane coming back to Louisiana for my father’s funeral, I remembered a story he used to tell when I was a child. It was this: A little girl is crossing over a bridge. There’s a troll under the bridge who doesn’t like little girls; any that cross over, he eats them up. But…
Karen pushed away from the edge of the desk. She should have brought a poster along to give her eyes some hold on the blank wall-a favorite painting, or that eleven-by-fourteen frame with different size cutouts in the mat, oval and square and rectangular openings, her daughter gazing through them at different stages of her…
Hello Sadness come out from around that door the barn door the city steel door that lock that hedge where I see you but feel you not enough to make me proper. Come, sit on my shoulder Sadness now if you're dry or reluctant I'll wet you with welcome, wear you for the weight. I've…
Go figure—it's a knitting performance every day, keeping body and clouds together, the sky grounded. Simulcast, ecumenical as everywhere, stay and hedge against the bet of bouffant space, you're the binding commitment so worlds won't split. Last week we had Thanksgiving. The post-cold warriors held a summit full of East-meets-West high hopes. Why not hold…
On the way to the village store I drive through a down-draft from the neighbor's chimney. Woodsmoke tumbles from the eaves backlit by sun, reminding me of the fire and sulfur of Grandmother's vengeful God, the one who disapproves of Bermuda shorts for girls, playing cards, strong waters, and adultery. A moment later the smoke…
Now it's raining again. Will it, luminous, ever take the place of freedom, passion in the capital? The raindrops need not formulate as prison bars— again. The absence of rain was an illusion first one, then the other settled for. It's easy to stay up all night in the music, drinking from the robber's cup—…
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