Trevor’s father said to go on and get in the Suburban with Jean and her kids. Trevor balked and his sister Lesley-Ann acted like she wouldn’t even be able to cross the yard unless he came with her. Trevor’s father told him again to go on, and Trevor did. Halfway across the yard he could…
In the fall of 2016, I traveled to China for the first time, a two-month fellowship sponsored by the Shanghai Writers’ Association. I was there to work on a new novel, but in reality, I spent much of my time and attention putting together this issue of Ploughshares. It was a good time to be…
How deeply I drink up home catalogs day— they shine open my diorama and teach me to lift my tiny arms to hang the dime as a mirrory thing upon my shoebox wall. Here’s a sunshine page that reads, “A home expands via the wise use of mirrors wherever you wish for a window.” I’ve…
By candlelight the house went down. It’s no wonder the rats won’t come sleep in my newly rented corners…though to me a gathering of low creatures would be a luminous, a concordant, a thing. Be slow to wish extinct the ugly rodent beasts. You can’t know when all that’s theirs will be more than yours,…
I knew better than to light light after light. I knew—I can’t recall to see candles out and could put the house down in burning—. What if someone asked me, then, do you want to receive its ashes? I’d say yes, that’s the right thing…(but deep down I’d say no, no ashes.). To imagine the…
Gray skies. A silver tray of individually wrapped cheeses. Bad coffee in boardrooms. That was Prague to me, that “city of a hundred spires.” And I might have boarded the plane knowing nothing more had Antonin not turned to me during that final dinner and said, “If you are free tomorrow, perhaps we go on…
No one was having a good day. It was December in Minnesota and we were all at a stage in our lives where our therapist thought we might be less loserlike if we met late Monday morning. Late morning because early morning wasn’t an option for some of us—because some of us couldn’t keep ourselves…
We fight about her birth control pills, for one thing. They cost about twenty dollars, and Tamara wants me to buy them, and that is something she has wanted for some time. At Planned Parenthood, they have my name on a form, she tells me. She writes down the address and sticks it in my…
I. at thirteen for a whole dark season I was lethal with my pellet gun murdering small things that wandered into yard stalking the thin woods between our house & the highway— I picked off any bird squirrel rabbit snake I could track if I had two surprised seconds to explain the meaning of my…
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