Ploughshares is pleased to present Belle Boggs with the first annual Ashley Leigh Bourne Prize for Fiction for her short story “In the Shadow of Man,” which appeared in the Summer 2018 issue, guest-edited by Jill McCorkle. The $2,500 prize, sponsored by longtime patron Hunter C. Bourne III and selected by our editors, honors a…
The sickening canal retains a gruesome beauty. Today, the weather has waxed psychotic—chilly rainy in the morning, humid and dense as it grew hot, sunny for a second, and now the bluish gray of photographs of Eastern Europe flows from the train bridge into the sky. On the surface of the water, a cascade of…
We feel we have felt felt. We have felt what felt we have. Have felt. Feel. We feel what felt we felt is not what felt felt is. What we have, we feel. What felt we have! Feel! Feel not what is, feel what felt is not. Not we, not felt. Is is is? We…
Picture civilizations like sparse swarms of fireflies, space/time like the evening air in which they’re suspended. Each bug flashes independently, never simultaneously, randomly announcing itself without regard for its distance from another or for the duration of its light. That one there! That one is us! Doesn’t it lately seem a foregone conclusion that the…
for Anna Maria Hong The master believes himself superior to his slaves. He desires comfort. He considers security and prosperity his birthrights. He prefers to ignore the labor required to create his luxurious world. He often fails to acknowledge the extravagance of his environment by comparing it unfavorably to the surroundings of more prosperous…
First things first: I have bad feet. Otherwise this entire incident would never have happened. I prefer not to go into details about the feet—they’re rather intimate parts, don’t you think? Witness foot fetishes, for example. Or the binding of women’s feet in China, for which many cultural reasons have been adduced, but which always…
Ooga booga jigga bigga nigga ziggurati bati boom boom tutti fruitti Djibouti mama comma no drama Obama from a llama fonana fana Rosannadanna chapati do be doobie Debbie Rebbie covfefe lemme crammalamadingdong ching chong Chobani Thulani Donnie honey Damiani Romani in de windy Indy bindi— do the Lindy, Cindy. Damn you fam, you slam a…
Too easy, perhaps, to romanticize your behavior by comparing it to natural phenomena. Yes, the bird may land on the branch out of instinct, without thinking (though who can know for sure). The human being chooses to love based on a hodgepodge of past experiences—a sense of humor, shared values, similar tastes, compatibility, even combativeness….
Here is the sequence of events from my perspective. I stopped at the stop light, in the right lane. It was early enough in the morning that I did not quite have my wits about me. But that doesn’t matter. I saw a group of five white women, all dressed alike, in tight-fitting black shorts…
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