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 intimate places of his father’s body were now within his reach, turned over to the touch of his fingers: his father who had never embraced him as a child. First he would touch his earlobes, to move them out of the way for the scissors, which had been taken out of the mother-of-pearl damascene box. Then he would take the nose between his thumb and forefinger, and give it a slight lift so as to shave above the upper lip. And the more the cancer gnawed away at the liver and the body grew limp, the more it opened to him, replete with its disappointments, sated with its tribulations. They would sit together in silence, the father and he, the youngest of his sons.
Who can give an account of occasions
Can mechanized description so falter
Can move toward gesture to scissor the outline
Each to enable a series of seconds breaking or burning
Can undo the work of a million years of human love
if I curse you just right
In this wet season my gone mother
climbs back again
and everything here smells gutted—
bloodtide, sea grapes in thick bloom,
our smashed plates and teacups. Dismantling
this grey shoreline for some kind of home, scared
orphans out bleating with the mongrels,
all of us starved
for something reclaimable. What chases them,
her barefoot rain, stains my unopened petunia,
shined church shoes, our black words, our hands.
I’ll catch the day creep in, her dirt marking my father’s
neck, oil-dreck steeped dark to every collar,
her tar this same fish odor I am washing.
I know I am one of them. The emptied.
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.
This is the address to the station that be playin the news, she say. Imma write to them and they gonna do a story on us.
I’m like, Yo, Kandese, that’s a good idea.
My mama put on the news every night. I didn’t know you could send them letters.
Ain’t no news cameras comin down here, Bernita say. Cops don’t even come here.
She love rainin on parades.
So I came home. To Pittsburgh. My parents were there, and my sister was there, married with children now, and certainly after Paris that wasn’t for me. I’ve always loved Pittsburgh, especially when it looked its worst. I’ve written about that, of course: Pittsburgh before they cleaned it up. Now it’s this immaculate city, all finance and technology, but back then you could die just from taking a breath on the street. The air was black and steaming with smog—“hell with the lid off” they used to say—and there was the clanging of trains, and the great mills, a very dramatic place, and maybe had I stayed and got lucky I might have been the Balzac of Pittsburgh. But I had to escape my family. I had to go to New York.
The intimate places of his father’s body were now within his reach, turned over to the touch of his fingers: his father who had never embraced him as a child. First he would touch his earlobes, to move them out of the way for the scissors, which had been taken out of the mother-of-pearl damascene box. Then he would take the nose between his thumb and forefinger, and give it a slight lift so as to shave above the upper lip. And the more the cancer gnawed away at the liver and the body grew limp, the more it opened to him, replete with its disappointments, sated with its tribulations. They would sit together in silence, the father and he, the youngest of his sons.
Who can give an account of occasions
Can mechanized description so falter
Can move toward gesture to scissor the outline
Each to enable a series of seconds breaking or burning
Can undo the work of a million years of human love
if I curse you just right
In this wet season my gone mother
climbs back again
and everything here smells gutted—
bloodtide, sea grapes in thick bloom,
our smashed plates and teacups. Dismantling
this grey shoreline for some kind of home, scared
orphans out bleating with the mongrels,
all of us starved
for something reclaimable. What chases them,
her barefoot rain, stains my unopened petunia,
shined church shoes, our black words, our hands.
I’ll catch the day creep in, her dirt marking my father’s
neck, oil-dreck steeped dark to every collar,
her tar this same fish odor I am washing.
I know I am one of them. The emptied.
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.
This is the address to the station that be playin the news, she say. Imma write to them and they gonna do a story on us.
I’m like, Yo, Kandese, that’s a good idea.
My mama put on the news every night. I didn’t know you could send them letters.
Ain’t no news cameras comin down here, Bernita say. Cops don’t even come here.
She love rainin on parades.
So I came home. To Pittsburgh. My parents were there, and my sister was there, married with children now, and certainly after Paris that wasn’t for me. I’ve always loved Pittsburgh, especially when it looked its worst. I’ve written about that, of course: Pittsburgh before they cleaned it up. Now it’s this immaculate city, all finance and technology, but back then you could die just from taking a breath on the street. The air was black and steaming with smog—“hell with the lid off” they used to say—and there was the clanging of trains, and the great mills, a very dramatic place, and maybe had I stayed and got lucky I might have been the Balzac of Pittsburgh. But I had to escape my family. I had to go to New York.