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.
Like the liftoff of an airliner, the stamping of auto body parts requires inhuman force, producing decibels registered by your internal organs. The presses sound, unmistakably, as if they could kill you, which they could, without much interrupting their normal functioning. You’d notice the collision more than they would.
The family lined up to kiss me. With Guillaume and then Odile, I aimed for the wrong cheek and ended up butting noses with Guillaume and nearly kissing Odile on the lips, which seemed to horrify her and her profound sense of propriety. Before her turn, Lola told me, “Right cheek first,” which clarified everything, and I was prepared for Nicole. No one else seemed to be bothered that Nicole wore no shirt. As we kissed, I smelled makeup and removers, nail polish and toothpaste, and the lingering odor of her younger children—sour milk and butter cookies.
THE PLEASING HOUR © 1999 by Lily King; reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Atlantic, Inc.
Mountain tips soften after so much rain,
the wild guesses of birds blending with air
and the uppermost buds, with a godlike
promotion, burst open.
Especially beautiful
are the brown and drunken bats
who nosedive down the barnside,
not quite earthbroken.
At the end of the hall, through the partially opened waiting-room door, she saw the hemline of a black dress, the gray of once-white tennis shoes, and a green hijab that, rather than covering the long black hair, held the broken arm of a young woman who was made of bird bones and calcium deficiency, who believed this to be her twenty-second broken bone, when in fact it was merely her twenty-first.
In that darkness,
Speakers rose like
Housing projects,
Moonlight diamonded
Mesh-wire panes.
What was it that bloomed
Around his curled
Body when the lights
Came up, fluorescent,
Vacant, garish?
The gym throbbed
With beats & rage
And his eyes darted
Like a man nailed
To a burning crucifix.
When I say my wives are cages, I don’t mean I’m a bird.
Collapsible shelves, they hide their usefulness when not
in use. All my wives contain terrariums: terrible and fetid
atmospheres in which their salamander selves linger atop
damp rocks. Their hands are damp as the tissues they ball
in their hands, though none of my wives could make a fist,
not even if I asked, no, not even if I commanded them to,
an amusing idea I must someday revisit. My wives are like
the Small Mammal House at the zoo, their rooms kept dark
so visitors may view their nocturnal truths, that anonymous
wakefulness we sleepers do not care to know. None of my
wives are like lanterns, nor do their ribs sing with canaries...
Like the liftoff of an airliner, the stamping of auto body parts requires inhuman force, producing decibels registered by your internal organs. The presses sound, unmistakably, as if they could kill you, which they could, without much interrupting their normal functioning. You’d notice the collision more than they would.
The family lined up to kiss me. With Guillaume and then Odile, I aimed for the wrong cheek and ended up butting noses with Guillaume and nearly kissing Odile on the lips, which seemed to horrify her and her profound sense of propriety. Before her turn, Lola told me, “Right cheek first,” which clarified everything, and I was prepared for Nicole. No one else seemed to be bothered that Nicole wore no shirt. As we kissed, I smelled makeup and removers, nail polish and toothpaste, and the lingering odor of her younger children—sour milk and butter cookies.
THE PLEASING HOUR © 1999 by Lily King; reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Atlantic, Inc.
Mountain tips soften after so much rain,
the wild guesses of birds blending with air
and the uppermost buds, with a godlike
promotion, burst open.
Especially beautiful
are the brown and drunken bats
who nosedive down the barnside,
not quite earthbroken.
At the end of the hall, through the partially opened waiting-room door, she saw the hemline of a black dress, the gray of once-white tennis shoes, and a green hijab that, rather than covering the long black hair, held the broken arm of a young woman who was made of bird bones and calcium deficiency, who believed this to be her twenty-second broken bone, when in fact it was merely her twenty-first.
In that darkness,
Speakers rose like
Housing projects,
Moonlight diamonded
Mesh-wire panes.
What was it that bloomed
Around his curled
Body when the lights
Came up, fluorescent,
Vacant, garish?
The gym throbbed
With beats & rage
And his eyes darted
Like a man nailed
To a burning crucifix.
When I say my wives are cages, I don’t mean I’m a bird.
Collapsible shelves, they hide their usefulness when not
in use. All my wives contain terrariums: terrible and fetid
atmospheres in which their salamander selves linger atop
damp rocks. Their hands are damp as the tissues they ball
in their hands, though none of my wives could make a fist,
not even if I asked, no, not even if I commanded them to,
an amusing idea I must someday revisit. My wives are like
the Small Mammal House at the zoo, their rooms kept dark
so visitors may view their nocturnal truths, that anonymous
wakefulness we sleepers do not care to know. None of my
wives are like lanterns, nor do their ribs sing with canaries...