“So she thoroughly taught him that one cannot take pleasure without giving pleasure, and that every gesture, every caress, every touch, every glance, every last bit of the body has its secret, which brings happiness to the person who knows how to wake it. She taught him that after a celebration of love the lovers…
“The Rabbi’s father is coming!” Rose, the secretary, always overly exuberant, was telling Miriam Goldman the news. When they saw Claire walk in, Rose turned to her. “I’m so excited about your father’s visit!” “Thank you,” said Claire. “It’s so sweet he’s coming all the way here.” “It is,” agreed Claire, and hoped her insincerity—and…
In this poem someone has taken the edge of one hand & swept the crumbs from the counter. In this poem we save what falls & Jesus speaks lightly, a breeze carrying the river’s scent. And all the day & night of this poem a face asks what’s left after science, after the black &…
Write a poem about the sounds the ice makes end of winter, my father says. I could say grinds like slow gears. I could say moans and grieves, cracks like a gun in the night but holds, and I would not be wrong. There’s a remedy for winter called the tilting of the…
I sat in the corner of a crowded one-room bookshop nibbling a complimentary madeleine and listening for the words that would signal the start of a marathon reading. “For a long time,” Marcel Proust’s seven-volume In Search of Lost Time begins, “I used to go to bed early.” Bed was a long way off for…
We hiked back to those desert rocks just after Christmas. We saw the whale head rising from the sea, and the parrot’s odd unstaring eye. We saw a thousand plump barrel cactuses, and a single antelope squirrel, and a half-dozen lizards running ahead of us on the path. We saw one yellow flower and saw…
After Marilyn When I let the river answer I hear the birds, waxwing, junco… The gardener snips, pilgrims speak softly, the creek rambles. River, tell me how to rest— why moments short as a headturn become torrents of sludge. When the river answers it asks: “Have you come with memories, regrets, …
In nonfiction, our winner is Ellen Adams for her essay “The Something I Am Telling You.” Nonfiction judge Meghan Daum said of the piece: “In telling the story of a brain losing its moorings, the author pulled off an astonishing trick and made me feel like the brain itself was talking to me. There is…
In fiction, our winner is Rowan Beaird for her story “Perennial.” Of her story, fiction judge Garth Greenwell said, “The subject of this delicate, psychologically penetrating story is the derangement of grief, which it dramatizes with deftness and patience. It demands a similar patience from the reader; its quiet discloses startling depths. Best of all…
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