Fog on the water. Squeaking nylon. Granddad adjusts his bulk in the lawn chair and points. “There.” His long fingers are a contrast to his pear-shaped body, which Gramma says is the reason he switched to overalls a decade ago. “Doesn’t look right,” he says,...
Pleiades welcomes submissions to the Prufer Poetry Prize during the month of October. The winner will receive $1,000 and publication in Pleiades: Literature in Context. The 2026 award will be judged by Sadie Dupuis. The Prufer Poetry Prize honors Kevin Prufer,...
Heat WaveThe summer my oldest daughter is born is a blaze,roaring up from the Sahara to blanket all of Europe.Roads buckle from the boil. Bascule bridges lift and swell,stuck half-risen and unable to fit back in place.The news reports rising hospitalizations, even...
MOST DAYS I FEEL LIKE PNIN I’d be remiss if i didn’t share that it’s very difficult to leave even more-difficult to not blame yourself for the rest of your life, your nose was bleeding while we were playing the fog rolled in, if clarity is a napkin, thrice I was a...
I believe in the belief of you, numb-kneed women hunched like commas over the cap rail,smelling of dry tears and talcum, fingers basket-woven, or men bent slightly at the middle like folded playing cards, heads hung, the mumblings of their prayerslike the humming of...
And there you were—the sun, salt-haze,survival vaporized in my blood. Fever humid, Juneweekend in June, I was looking for younot knowing I was looking. What should I call you? An anniversary, a terror, my real life, a window? I offered myself up to the pale field of...
Rakija (Again)My grandmother-in-law likes to tell us the same stories after dinner, the yearsclear as the windows of our glasses, filled again with the firewater made from winemaking’s remains: seeds, stems, and skins. Faint grape fumes wafting mirage-like into our...
The art of loveThe wet finger of Our Lady of Rain taps across the seadown the karst-bright tower blocks, past the cars disappearing in fog.Our one-bedroom flat echoeswith Siouxsie and the Banshees and I leaf through Dad’s paperbackromances and the glossy Erotika:...