Lauren Groff recommends Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot (Counterpoint, 2018). “I’ve been haunted by this talented writer’s first memoir since I read it a month ago. It is knife-sharp and beautifully strange and so full of both kinds of madness that the madness seems to leak through the text and into the reader.” …
Ploughshares is pleased to present Dantiel W. Moniz with the eighth annual Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction for her short story “Milk Blood Heat,” which appeared in the Spring 2018 issue, guest-edited by Lan Samantha Chang. The $2,500 prize, sponsored by member of the Ploughshares advisory board, longtime patron, acclaimed writer, and former guest editor…
I think, if I could, I’d be anything else in this world. Mimosa pudica, my leaves closing when touched. I’d go back to 1729, take for shelter the awful crypt Master kept me in with only enough water to last between his visits, during which he spoke not to me but about…
after Claude McKay & what’s the world to carve into your tombstone then? Here lies a man, twenty-seven years old. He died but he ain’t no punk. He was one knife slicing, shit- talkin’ wick. The most lit sonofabitch who’s ever lived. He slept with Smith & Wessons under silk pillowcases. Here lies a…
with lines from D. A. Powell We unyoke owl pellets from marrow in desert meadow. His mouth pigeon eye, a torch, womb turned flower. He, still a boy, dug from cactus skull. Undress into bark beetles. He unlearns how to hold a fist with my hand. Bursts into dandelion seeds. We…
I. It’s entirely up to me to remember what you said. But all I recall is water, flour, strained yolk adding up to something beaten and inedible. I placed my ear to your stomach, where excess warmth gathers in the name of the body’s clandestine ritual of diminishment. I’d crouch at your feet in the…
I got a carousel of carved horses: pastel pinks, blues, greens safely the most beautiful toy our garden apartment had ever seen And Grandma Shine gave my brother a flashlight that resembled a roll of Lifesavers And he was quiet a moment before he began to whisper about the beauty of his Lifesavers…
my friend tells me she’s been running in the cemetery in the afternoon she calls it just-a-garden-really first i am afraid & then i am afraid everything is cemetery & garden my late uncle’s flower shop my daughter learning to fold a paper into a boat sea salt marriage dawn old french music this vertical…
It could be a decade later, years of living an accustomed, an unvigilant life. I trust my surroundings again, like a person instead of a witness. I could be shopping at the grocery, choosing one of the fancier cheeses, when I bump carts with my ex, my whiteness. Oh my god, this is where you’ve…
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