Whiting Award Winners
Since 1985, the Foundation has supported creative writing through the Whiting Awards, which are given annually to ten emerging writers in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama.
…he didn’t do it the clean way. He stepped out onto his front stoop where I could see him, cocked his shotgun, the one his daddy had given him, and aimed at me. I am trying to think that the reason my daddy fired over my head instead of into it is that he loved me so much.
You are told when to sleep and when to wake up. If you spend too much time in your bedroom, it indicates that you’re being antisocial; if you do sit in the common areas, but don’t interact with the other patients, you’re probably depressed or overly inward or perhaps even catatonic. Humans might all be ciphers to one another, but people with mental illness are particularly opaque because of our broken brains; we cannot be trusted about anything, including our own experiences.
Gruel, crumbs on a table
of ice, a labyrinth of snow:
and infinite distances
in the small box of the kitchen.
Mother chopped pieces
of her heart into the skillet.
Brother and I heard oil sizzle
until we huddled in shame.
She salted the meat with tears.
She cried if we ate
and cried if we refused to eat,
warning You’ll go hungry.
We Googled how to shoot gun, and when we tried, we were spooked by the recoil, by the salty smell and smoke, by the liturgical drama of the whole thing in the woods. But actually we loved to shoot them, the guns. We liked to shoot them wrong even, with a loose hand, the pitch forward and the pitch back. Under our judicious trigger fingers, beer bottles died, Vogue magazines died, Chia Pets died, oak saplings died, squirrels died, elk died. We feasted.
Any time Manny wanted to sell a gun or a big load of weed he’d hand the deal over to one of his main boys. Manny called Chico, Beto, and Paco, then Chevy and Rafa, his right hands cause they was ready to slice open an enemy or blood up a buyer that didn’t pay up, and so they got the juiciest sheep and the most money. Got the most room on the street. The rest of the Lobos was just taggers or third-raters. Tagger babies are the locos who sprayed our sets all over town so people know we own it. They’d dog around here with their spray paint cans and their fake-tough faces, bragging how they did a job up on the freeway signs or almost got busted by the police for messing up a mural. “Hey, homes!” they’d laugh out to each other. “You see the job I did? Got up twenty feet that time!”
LOCAS © 1997 by Yxta Maya Murray; reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Atlantic, Inc.
Child or woman. Memory or need. Today, again, I can see you
in her eyes, today her eyes again pursue the ground, look
for some sign, some path to follow away from her route.
Her sweatshirt is zipped to the throat and I am realizing that
we are both then, somehow ashamed of what has suddenly happened
between us. And I’m slowing down a little, as if to let
the spring sun catch up to these hands on the steering wheel,
to these hands that will not ever stop needing breasts to
make them hands, as if to uncover my mouth
and yell across the lawns to her.
…he didn’t do it the clean way. He stepped out onto his front stoop where I could see him, cocked his shotgun, the one his daddy had given him, and aimed at me. I am trying to think that the reason my daddy fired over my head instead of into it is that he loved me so much.
You are told when to sleep and when to wake up. If you spend too much time in your bedroom, it indicates that you’re being antisocial; if you do sit in the common areas, but don’t interact with the other patients, you’re probably depressed or overly inward or perhaps even catatonic. Humans might all be ciphers to one another, but people with mental illness are particularly opaque because of our broken brains; we cannot be trusted about anything, including our own experiences.
Gruel, crumbs on a table
of ice, a labyrinth of snow:
and infinite distances
in the small box of the kitchen.
Mother chopped pieces
of her heart into the skillet.
Brother and I heard oil sizzle
until we huddled in shame.
She salted the meat with tears.
She cried if we ate
and cried if we refused to eat,
warning You’ll go hungry.
We Googled how to shoot gun, and when we tried, we were spooked by the recoil, by the salty smell and smoke, by the liturgical drama of the whole thing in the woods. But actually we loved to shoot them, the guns. We liked to shoot them wrong even, with a loose hand, the pitch forward and the pitch back. Under our judicious trigger fingers, beer bottles died, Vogue magazines died, Chia Pets died, oak saplings died, squirrels died, elk died. We feasted.
Any time Manny wanted to sell a gun or a big load of weed he’d hand the deal over to one of his main boys. Manny called Chico, Beto, and Paco, then Chevy and Rafa, his right hands cause they was ready to slice open an enemy or blood up a buyer that didn’t pay up, and so they got the juiciest sheep and the most money. Got the most room on the street. The rest of the Lobos was just taggers or third-raters. Tagger babies are the locos who sprayed our sets all over town so people know we own it. They’d dog around here with their spray paint cans and their fake-tough faces, bragging how they did a job up on the freeway signs or almost got busted by the police for messing up a mural. “Hey, homes!” they’d laugh out to each other. “You see the job I did? Got up twenty feet that time!”
LOCAS © 1997 by Yxta Maya Murray; reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Atlantic, Inc.
Child or woman. Memory or need. Today, again, I can see you
in her eyes, today her eyes again pursue the ground, look
for some sign, some path to follow away from her route.
Her sweatshirt is zipped to the throat and I am realizing that
we are both then, somehow ashamed of what has suddenly happened
between us. And I’m slowing down a little, as if to let
the spring sun catch up to these hands on the steering wheel,
to these hands that will not ever stop needing breasts to
make them hands, as if to uncover my mouth
and yell across the lawns to her.