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).
Tess Gallagher recommends My Name Is Not Viola by Lawrence Matsuda (Endicott and Hugh Books, 2019). “My Name Is Not Viola belongs to all of us who wish to experience the WWII Japanese American forced incarceration heartbeat through the eyes of Hanae Tamura. As one of the 120,000 victims jailed without due process, she was…
On reprieve from the rainbut not the heat— we watch it gather like flowersor the men who build a house in fits & startsacross the street. They saw & nail whatI can’t see—a coffin cut to measure, or wedding dresssewn closed along the pinked seams. The earthstitched shut above the heads of the dead—whose hands, before buried, held flowers or rosariesor only each…
Of us there is always less.The days hammer past, artificial daisies at the grave.Words I didn’t choose for my father’s headstone & those that came insteadto live around my neck, dog tags a tin pendulum on my chest.On my mother’s side, my cousin, too young, dirt a pile above herbut no stone, nothing but the tinfoil name from the funeral home—the…
What does the water want?Enters where it is not welcome, jacksup the foundation uneven & splits the woodlike a look— it rusts it rustsrusts the roof through— drops by unannounced when your house a mess,rifles through Mama’s drawers, papers, borrows books for weeks& returns them waterlogged, dogged, without no note—or knock—plucks baby pictures out their frames& blurs all the names— endless,oblivious, it apologizes & blesses&…
Quarter-glass in the dawn-light’s mottled hyphen. The risk of it, the resistance.I stitched the mask from lathered skins. Motes of flour in the bakery’s apse.I breathe like the machine I am, I proof the stubborn yeast. Nectar of planished facesarticulating the angles: of self, of theology, of the spaces recently occupiedby doors, closed to us. My…
Then happiness became an egg that brokeacross our table. Fragments of shellthrough which yolk pooled to placemats:bright goopy gold that filled loose napkin foldsas if all I could wish for from luck.My three-year-old pulls himself up alongsideto mash peas on his tray and meow at my handand command time to follow and stay. Can I…
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