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.
The last visitor left.
You closed the door and smiled at me.
I watched you cross Room 515 through
the flowers in vases, and your face
looked just like your face, smiling
down at me in my stupid green issue gown.
I felt myself want you
through the plastic tubes,
the vines around, across and above me.
I felt myself want you
exclusively. Even pain faded
into the scenery as you leaned in
to kiss me. And I met your kiss
with my lips and we were both
folded into it,
into that clean clean folding,
that soft longed-for kiss
across the side rails. That particular kiss
in its delicious oblivion hoisted us
above the suffering body.
We felt that long transfer of soft
for softness, that kiss lifting us
above the basement drawers
where we would finally face up.
Book Mansion was overwhelming. China’s largest bookstore occupied 172,000 square feet and carried 230,000 titles. Bestsellers included Chinese titles such as I Was an American Police Officer; I’m Only Raising You for 18 Years; Chinese-Style Divorce; and Harvard Girl, a memoir that revealed the parenting style that made her stand out from her Chinese classmates and gain acceptance to the school. That book was in its sixty-third printing.
Downstairs, Monica’s Story lay between Bill and Hillary Clinton’s autobiographies. A boxed set about Göring rubbed shoulders with What’s Behind Jewish Excellence? Translated American titles ranged from the predictable – The Da Vinci Code, The Atkins Diet—to the surprising—Henry Rollins’s Get in the Van, and a Woody Allen collection whose Chinese title promised MENSA Whores. An entire floor held English-learning materials. Love English taught pickup lines and pillow talk, including cultural hints such as “‘I’m bored’ really means ‘Do you want to have sex?’”
The shambles of the gods stretches for miles,
a salvage yard where the smell of hot chrome rises,
where finned bodies lie beached and rusting,
and their names recall great chiefs
and tribes and the empowering animals.
Thunderbird, Winnebago, Mustang, Pontiac –
you must say these names out loud. You must
strip the radios in which the myths survive.
Repeat: Wi-Yuh returns to abolish the custom of killing
the beasts for their names. Leave the road maps
on the dashboards. Learn the song of spawning fish.
The cabin rattled. The bulkheads shook. The overhead bins popped open. Bags, briefcases, satchels rained down. The cellist clenched her eyes. I felt her fingers tightened on mine—but it was Ana I felt beside me.
We broke cloud cover and dropped into a pool of dark. The bones around my cheeks pressed into my skull. I saw the sheet music flattened like a stamp on the ceiling. The metamorphoses. I couldn’t tell which way was up and which was down and out the window a green light stood on the top of the world, a lighthouse spun above us, a brief flame somewhere in the night.
He tried to swerve around her but, instead, went into a slide. The reds and yellows in the road stretched out. Cottonwood leaves roared in his head. His bowels shuddered. Even before he struck the girl and hurled her into the creek bed, he felt all the familiar habits of the world begin to recede.
Everyone in anthro knows it, it’s an open secret, but coming home from the field is as tough as going out. Maybe even tougher. When you go out on the road, you’re you; and when you come back, you’re not you anymore, but they’re still them.
The last visitor left.
You closed the door and smiled at me.
I watched you cross Room 515 through
the flowers in vases, and your face
looked just like your face, smiling
down at me in my stupid green issue gown.
I felt myself want you
through the plastic tubes,
the vines around, across and above me.
I felt myself want you
exclusively. Even pain faded
into the scenery as you leaned in
to kiss me. And I met your kiss
with my lips and we were both
folded into it,
into that clean clean folding,
that soft longed-for kiss
across the side rails. That particular kiss
in its delicious oblivion hoisted us
above the suffering body.
We felt that long transfer of soft
for softness, that kiss lifting us
above the basement drawers
where we would finally face up.
Book Mansion was overwhelming. China’s largest bookstore occupied 172,000 square feet and carried 230,000 titles. Bestsellers included Chinese titles such as I Was an American Police Officer; I’m Only Raising You for 18 Years; Chinese-Style Divorce; and Harvard Girl, a memoir that revealed the parenting style that made her stand out from her Chinese classmates and gain acceptance to the school. That book was in its sixty-third printing.
Downstairs, Monica’s Story lay between Bill and Hillary Clinton’s autobiographies. A boxed set about Göring rubbed shoulders with What’s Behind Jewish Excellence? Translated American titles ranged from the predictable – The Da Vinci Code, The Atkins Diet—to the surprising—Henry Rollins’s Get in the Van, and a Woody Allen collection whose Chinese title promised MENSA Whores. An entire floor held English-learning materials. Love English taught pickup lines and pillow talk, including cultural hints such as “‘I’m bored’ really means ‘Do you want to have sex?’”
The shambles of the gods stretches for miles,
a salvage yard where the smell of hot chrome rises,
where finned bodies lie beached and rusting,
and their names recall great chiefs
and tribes and the empowering animals.
Thunderbird, Winnebago, Mustang, Pontiac –
you must say these names out loud. You must
strip the radios in which the myths survive.
Repeat: Wi-Yuh returns to abolish the custom of killing
the beasts for their names. Leave the road maps
on the dashboards. Learn the song of spawning fish.
The cabin rattled. The bulkheads shook. The overhead bins popped open. Bags, briefcases, satchels rained down. The cellist clenched her eyes. I felt her fingers tightened on mine—but it was Ana I felt beside me.
We broke cloud cover and dropped into a pool of dark. The bones around my cheeks pressed into my skull. I saw the sheet music flattened like a stamp on the ceiling. The metamorphoses. I couldn’t tell which way was up and which was down and out the window a green light stood on the top of the world, a lighthouse spun above us, a brief flame somewhere in the night.
He tried to swerve around her but, instead, went into a slide. The reds and yellows in the road stretched out. Cottonwood leaves roared in his head. His bowels shuddered. Even before he struck the girl and hurled her into the creek bed, he felt all the familiar habits of the world begin to recede.
Everyone in anthro knows it, it’s an open secret, but coming home from the field is as tough as going out. Maybe even tougher. When you go out on the road, you’re you; and when you come back, you’re not you anymore, but they’re still them.