The day before their wedding, Alfonso and Sonya beat drums in theCentral Square opening the puppet show. When the deaf boy, Petya,sneezes in the first row, one of the puppets, a police sergeant, col-lapses, its wooden ear in the snow. The puppet stands, and shakes hisnose at the audience. An army jeep swerves around the corner…
I thought I would make a short list of what is not a feeling.Birds are not feelings.Birds eating cherries from the tree are not feelings.This is the best entertainment, I say to myself, watching birds eating cherries,and now I have made a feeling. The robin’s beak glistens with the sticky juice.When a cherry comes off…
It was a job Gary stumbled into while he was already gainfully employed as a CPA in Spoonington, Indiana. He and Dinah were at a dinner party at the home of one of her colleagues. Dinah was a lawyer who’d kept her own name. “Even if I did believe in taking another person’s name,” she’d…
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 meto lift my tiny arms to hang the dimeas a mirrory thing upon my shoebox wall. Here’s a sunshine page that reads,“A home expands via the wise use of mirrorswherever you wish for a window.”I’ve read it all, I’ve read, I’ve…
By candlelight the house went down.It’s no wonder the rats won’t come sleepin my newly rented corners…though to me a gatheringof low creatures would be a luminous, a concordant, a thing. Be slow to wish extinct the uglyrodent beasts. You can’t know when all that’s theirswill be more than yours, when a haystack of sleephuddled…
I knew better than to light light after light.I knew—I can’t recall to see candles outand 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 size of the boxable to…
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…
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