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.
My ex answers your call like shit is sweet, says, Good to hear from you, so fake you want to reach through the receiver. Next thing, she drops the phone minus nary a pardon and leaves you on an indefinite hold soundtracked by the blare of some rap video cranked beyond good sense. Meanwhile, you carry the noisy cordless into another room, crack the blinds, and watch a pair of baseheads, both thin as antennas, push a half-wrecked sedan down the street. The baseheads, they’ve got the sedan’s doors flung open, and seethe at each other across a scrappy ragtop roof. Farther, they jog their hooptie to a slow cruise, jump in on the run, and sputter off. It’s still plenty of lightweight action on the set. The old lady dressed in a who-gives-a-what-about-the-heat getup (down coat, snow boots, thick wool scarf) tugging a shopping cart full of thrashed cans. Down a ways, boys riding wheelies for distance on dirt bikes with mismatched rims.
On the way home, going,
with the hill & mammoth clouds
behind me, rushing to the house
before the rain, those beautiful Pakistani girls,
their faces happy as poppies, I thought, those girls
rushing home as I was rushing home
to beat the first small pieces
of rain falling down
like nickels in departing light. There
was the laughing of the beautiful girls,
shrieking gulls, five or six of them (depending
on whether I count myself), the bright
& shining planets of their dresses
lifting, just so, in the wind. & their black hairs.
& the black sound of horses, horses
hoofing it home, the click
& clop of their patent leather hooves—Still, it touches
my ear, this sound. I touch
my heart. I can’t stop touching
my heart & saying, Today is my birthday,
you see? For the beautiful clamor of planets
dressed as girls who, running home, have heads.
Whose heads swing black night, running home
on the black feet of horses, from the rain.
Now I understand. Today is my birthday.
It is Thursday, my day. My black day.
I realize then that Wichu knows. Of course he knows. He was here, at this temple, outside of the pavilion with his mother, when Khamron got drafted years ago. He was here when the wealthier boys got taken out of the line. He was here when those same boys came back an hour later, took their places at the end of the lottery line, and—when their turns came—drew black card after black card after black card. Wichu had told me all about it the night of his brother’s draft. Although I had only half listened to him at the time, the memory of his voice comes back to me now in all its anger.
“Draft Day” from SIGHTSEEING © 2005 by Rattawaut Lapcharoensap; reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Atlantic, Inc.
Outside, my grandfather wheeling
a pesticide tank
from tree to tree, spraying everything
with thick, white foam –
bark, leaf, apple flesh –
salting the garden
with handfuls of red sand, dissolving
aphid, Japanese beetle, horned tomato worm
as thick as rope. Gone
in an instant, emerging
from his fiberglass outbuilding shed, helving
an axe, bright blade, pine handle,
to eliminate
a dwarf peach weakened by nesting beetles.
O ordinary axe
“Malcolm is dead,” Eddie kept hearing as he raced to the shop. As he got closer, he saw the flashing lights, and the siren that had been only an eerie, barely audible musical accompaniment to his thoughts began to register as belonging to an ambulance and not as being a regular plant alarm. He knew that he would not cry no matter how awful it was; he never cried. That was one thing he never had to worry about. If one of them had to be killed here, it was better that it was Malcolm—because if Eddie had been killed, Malcolm would have cried like a baby.
My ex answers your call like shit is sweet, says, Good to hear from you, so fake you want to reach through the receiver. Next thing, she drops the phone minus nary a pardon and leaves you on an indefinite hold soundtracked by the blare of some rap video cranked beyond good sense. Meanwhile, you carry the noisy cordless into another room, crack the blinds, and watch a pair of baseheads, both thin as antennas, push a half-wrecked sedan down the street. The baseheads, they’ve got the sedan’s doors flung open, and seethe at each other across a scrappy ragtop roof. Farther, they jog their hooptie to a slow cruise, jump in on the run, and sputter off. It’s still plenty of lightweight action on the set. The old lady dressed in a who-gives-a-what-about-the-heat getup (down coat, snow boots, thick wool scarf) tugging a shopping cart full of thrashed cans. Down a ways, boys riding wheelies for distance on dirt bikes with mismatched rims.
On the way home, going,
with the hill & mammoth clouds
behind me, rushing to the house
before the rain, those beautiful Pakistani girls,
their faces happy as poppies, I thought, those girls
rushing home as I was rushing home
to beat the first small pieces
of rain falling down
like nickels in departing light. There
was the laughing of the beautiful girls,
shrieking gulls, five or six of them (depending
on whether I count myself), the bright
& shining planets of their dresses
lifting, just so, in the wind. & their black hairs.
& the black sound of horses, horses
hoofing it home, the click
& clop of their patent leather hooves—Still, it touches
my ear, this sound. I touch
my heart. I can’t stop touching
my heart & saying, Today is my birthday,
you see? For the beautiful clamor of planets
dressed as girls who, running home, have heads.
Whose heads swing black night, running home
on the black feet of horses, from the rain.
Now I understand. Today is my birthday.
It is Thursday, my day. My black day.
I realize then that Wichu knows. Of course he knows. He was here, at this temple, outside of the pavilion with his mother, when Khamron got drafted years ago. He was here when the wealthier boys got taken out of the line. He was here when those same boys came back an hour later, took their places at the end of the lottery line, and—when their turns came—drew black card after black card after black card. Wichu had told me all about it the night of his brother’s draft. Although I had only half listened to him at the time, the memory of his voice comes back to me now in all its anger.
“Draft Day” from SIGHTSEEING © 2005 by Rattawaut Lapcharoensap; reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Atlantic, Inc.
Outside, my grandfather wheeling
a pesticide tank
from tree to tree, spraying everything
with thick, white foam –
bark, leaf, apple flesh –
salting the garden
with handfuls of red sand, dissolving
aphid, Japanese beetle, horned tomato worm
as thick as rope. Gone
in an instant, emerging
from his fiberglass outbuilding shed, helving
an axe, bright blade, pine handle,
to eliminate
a dwarf peach weakened by nesting beetles.
O ordinary axe
“Malcolm is dead,” Eddie kept hearing as he raced to the shop. As he got closer, he saw the flashing lights, and the siren that had been only an eerie, barely audible musical accompaniment to his thoughts began to register as belonging to an ambulance and not as being a regular plant alarm. He knew that he would not cry no matter how awful it was; he never cried. That was one thing he never had to worry about. If one of them had to be killed here, it was better that it was Malcolm—because if Eddie had been killed, Malcolm would have cried like a baby.