Pushcart Prize XXXVIII: best of the small presses, 2014

Introduction / Bill Henderson --

Human snowball / Davy Rothbart --

Enlightenment / Natasha Trethewey --

Corn maze / Pam Houston --

Ming / Jill McDonough --

A full-service shelter / Amy Hempel --

During a break from feeling / Mary Ruefle --

Thirst / Taymiya R. Zaman --

Blues in five/four, the violence in Chicago / Afaa Michael Weaver --

What happens in hell / Charles Baxter --

After suicide / Matt Rasmussen --

Teen culture / Elizabeth Ellen --

Last call / Saeed Jones --

Healing power of the western oystercatcher / Howard Norman --

Cranes, mafiosos and a Polaroid camera / Natalie Diaz --

God of ducks / Tina Louise Blevins --

Ultrasound / David Hornibrook --

Lorry raja / Madhuri Vijay --

Origin / Sarah Lindsay --

Dead / Stephen Dixon --

From That once were beautiful children / Claudia Rankine --

Touch / Steve Adams --

Late oracle sonnet / David St. John --

Wings / Lorrie Moore --

Self-portrait with exit wounds / Ocean Vuong --

Reliquaries / Paul Zimmer --

Listening to Virginia / Jeffrey Harrison --

Iconography / Ay̨se Papatya Bucak --

Tallahatchie / Susan B.A. Somers-Willett --

Father of disorder / Jessica Wilbanks --

Your body down in gold / Carl Phillips --

Piece need not be built / Andrew Zolot --

Monster: classifications and explanations / Susan Slaviero --

Don't let them catch you / Molly Patterson --

Separaton/retention / Kwame Dawes --

Writing & publishing a memoir: what the hell have I done? / Andre Dubus III --

A summer garden / Louise Glück --

Donate! / Jack Livings --

Things to think about / Scott Beal --

Field museum / Roger Reeves --

A portrait of the writer as a rabbit / Sabine Heinlein --

There were such things / W.S. Di Piero --

Likable / Deb Olin Unferth --

Story / B.H. Fairchild --

Consequence / Eric Fair --

Lit cloud / Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge --

Reader / Robert Coover --

Islands / Yusef Komunyakaa --

Confessions of a recovering environmentalist / Paul Kingsnorth --

Ways to begin a poem / Rachel Rose --

In Colorado my father scoured and stacked dishes / Eduardo C. Corral --

Housebreaking / Sarah Frisch --

W.C. Fields takes a walk / Paisley Rekdal --

Out of date: the joys of obsolescence / Hal Crowther --

My neighbor's body / Beckian Fritz Goldberg --

Philanthropy / Suzanne Rivecca / Interrupting aubade ending in epiphany / Marcus Wicker --

Painting the summer palace of the queen / Philip Kelly --

Villon's epitaph (ballade of the hanged men) / François Villon --

If the man took / Joanna Ruocco --

All-American / David Hernandez --

Waste land app / Tess Taylor --

Akhmatova / Matthew Dickman --

Cadiz, Missouri / Robert Long Foreman --

Getting by / Bob Hicok --

Imagination / Sigrid Nunez --

Earth itself / Timothy Donnelly --

Love like that / Jude Nutter --

Gentleman's library, a nowaday redux / Bill Cotter --

Self-portrait as Superman (alternate take) / Jake Adam York.