I’m early again, so I sit idling in the parking lot, watching the young boys shoot baskets through the chain-link fence. My windows are open with the AC blowing at my knees on low. I just want to feel the wind on my face, but I can’t stand this heat right now, not when I’m…
She was seven and having her bacon and orange juice in the kitchen on North Kings Road in West Hollywood. Behind her and above the sink the jalousies were angled open. Outside were palm and hibiscus and there was weather. You could hear it. She looked at me and stopped chewing. Me at that age…
Circa 1960, in an early recording with La Sonora Matancera, Cuban songstress Celia Cruz belts out a street vendor’s tongue-twister offering candy by the kilo. Los traigo de coco y piña, de limón y miel de abeja. I’ve got coconut and pineapple, lemon and bees’ honey. De piña para las niñas y los de miel…
1. It’s usually a lone figure, backlit so as to seem anonymous and therefore universal, because if we don’t know who a person is, we’re more likely to think it could be us. No one seemed to consider the animosity of strangers or the threat we might associate with the unknown. The people are poised…
Romania, 1983 The curette is a stylus, my mother says as she wraps it gently, the way she wraps strudel, but in white linen and tighter. The stylus, my mother says, is a typewriter. That one we keep in uncle’s house, under floorboards in the pig shack. Uncle is illiterate and a drunk so…
Some people say there are only five possible plots. A stranger comes to town, a person falls in love with a stranger, a stranger’s true identity is revealed to themselves or to others, a war is fought in a strange land, and then—full circle—a person leaves town for a strange land. There are many variations…
Ploughshares is pleased to present Kashona Notah with the twelfth annual Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction for his story “Bettie Page and Jimmy Free Bird,” which appeared in the Winter 2022-23 Issue of Ploughshares, edited by Editor-in-chief Ladette Randolph and Poetry Editor John Skoyles. The $2,500 prize—sponsored by acclaimed writer, former guest editor, longtime patron,…
Ellen Bryant Voigt, Collected Poems (W. W. Norton, 2023) Marilyn Hacker, Calligraphies (W. W. Norton, 2023) DeWitt Henry, Restless for Words: Poems (Finishing Line Press, 2023) Helen Elaine Lee, Pomegranate (Atria, 2023) Gary Soto, Downtime (Gunpowder Press, 2023) Dan Wakefield, Kurt Vonnegut: The Making of a Writer (Seven Stories Press, 2022) Eleanor Wilner, Gone to…
Peter Ho Davies recommends Monstrilio by Gerardo Sámano Córdova (Zando, 2023). “A debut novel of dark, soulful magic reminiscent of Carmen Maria Machado or Silvia Moreno-Garcia (and further back, Mary Shelley). The horror of grief has rarely been so viscerally or movingly evoked.” Peter Ho Davies recommends The End of Drum-Time by Hanna Pylväinen (Henry…
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