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.
Edith Goodnough isn’t in the country anymore. She’s in town now, in the hospital, lying there is that white bed with a needle stuck in the back of one hand and a man standing guard in the hallway outside her room. She will be eighty years old this week: a clean beautiful white-haired woman who never in her life weighed as much as 115 pounds, and she has weighed a lot less than that since New Year’s Eve. Still, the sheriff and the lawyers expect her to get well enough for them to sit her up in a wheelchair and then drive her across town to the courthouse to begin the trial. When that happens, if that happens, I don’t know that they will go so far as to put handcuffs on her. Bus Sealy, the sheriff, has turned out to be a son of a bitch, all right, but I still can’t see him putting handcuffs on a woman like Edith Goodnough.
HOME IS WHERE
I peek from the slit
between my forearms.
Them. They come.
Eyes in all the heads glow.
The flow
melts my arm flesh
Burgundy vessels drip
from bone.
The graveyard this time of year is nice. Damp orange yellow red leaves pile at the headstones for pillows. Place my head in leaves. Soil moist and black like chocolate cake and taste like worms. Arms spread legs spread wind crawls up my pants leg to pocket soft backs of knees. Slightly arched back anchors shoulders to my throat, jaw, head. Eyes fixed to the blue grey. Meanwhile. An old deer limps over, sits like a dog, licks my shoes.
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 light made my skin look orange, and I started thinking about what Wickham had told us about light. She said that oranges and apples, leaves and flowers, the whole multicolored world, was not what it appeared to be. The colors we see, she said, look like they do only because of the light or ray that shines on them. “The color of the thing isn’t what you see but the light that’s reflected off it.” Then she shut out the lights and shone a white light on a prism. We watched the pale splay of colors on the projector screen; some people oohed and aahed. Suddenly, she switched on a black light and the color of everything changed. The prism colors vanished, Wickham’s arms were purple, the buttons of her dress were as orange as hot coals, rather than the blue they had been only seconds before. We were all very quiet. “Nothing,” she said, after a while, “is really what it appears to be.”
Go Ju go Ju go.
Lightskinned Rainbow
eclipsed Tick Tock,
his chocolate walk-partner.
Incestuous Pootchie and Tan.
Both Frogs. Squirrel. Crazy ass Sponge.
Bama Duke’s lopsided,
sticky daughter, Peaches.
Out b-shaped barber,
Blinky. We miss you,
Missy, rest in peace.
John Rocks-on-Rocks.
The Young Dillingers.
Freckles versus Baby Tim.
Cabalou stuttering,
i-m-m-mi-t-ta-ting Johnny Lips.
Hillbilly, Lefty, Itchy and Skip.
Dootie Bug’s first
baby’s mama, leaving.
Tootie had Fin.
At a party, I met a mercenary. He had fought Communists in Afghanistan before fighting Communists in Nicaragua. He described a process invented by the Russians to strip the skin off Afghan rebels. “It was psychological warfare disguised as chemical warfare,” he said. “The Moslem believes in the ‘pure warrior,’ sanctity of the body, that sort of thing. When he saw row after row of bodies with the skin peeling off, he went mad.” The mercenary drank his champagne. “A Moslem believes the skinless soul is doomed. Gone to hell.”
Edith Goodnough isn’t in the country anymore. She’s in town now, in the hospital, lying there is that white bed with a needle stuck in the back of one hand and a man standing guard in the hallway outside her room. She will be eighty years old this week: a clean beautiful white-haired woman who never in her life weighed as much as 115 pounds, and she has weighed a lot less than that since New Year’s Eve. Still, the sheriff and the lawyers expect her to get well enough for them to sit her up in a wheelchair and then drive her across town to the courthouse to begin the trial. When that happens, if that happens, I don’t know that they will go so far as to put handcuffs on her. Bus Sealy, the sheriff, has turned out to be a son of a bitch, all right, but I still can’t see him putting handcuffs on a woman like Edith Goodnough.
HOME IS WHERE
I peek from the slit
between my forearms.
Them. They come.
Eyes in all the heads glow.
The flow
melts my arm flesh
Burgundy vessels drip
from bone.
The graveyard this time of year is nice. Damp orange yellow red leaves pile at the headstones for pillows. Place my head in leaves. Soil moist and black like chocolate cake and taste like worms. Arms spread legs spread wind crawls up my pants leg to pocket soft backs of knees. Slightly arched back anchors shoulders to my throat, jaw, head. Eyes fixed to the blue grey. Meanwhile. An old deer limps over, sits like a dog, licks my shoes.
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 light made my skin look orange, and I started thinking about what Wickham had told us about light. She said that oranges and apples, leaves and flowers, the whole multicolored world, was not what it appeared to be. The colors we see, she said, look like they do only because of the light or ray that shines on them. “The color of the thing isn’t what you see but the light that’s reflected off it.” Then she shut out the lights and shone a white light on a prism. We watched the pale splay of colors on the projector screen; some people oohed and aahed. Suddenly, she switched on a black light and the color of everything changed. The prism colors vanished, Wickham’s arms were purple, the buttons of her dress were as orange as hot coals, rather than the blue they had been only seconds before. We were all very quiet. “Nothing,” she said, after a while, “is really what it appears to be.”
Go Ju go Ju go.
Lightskinned Rainbow
eclipsed Tick Tock,
his chocolate walk-partner.
Incestuous Pootchie and Tan.
Both Frogs. Squirrel. Crazy ass Sponge.
Bama Duke’s lopsided,
sticky daughter, Peaches.
Out b-shaped barber,
Blinky. We miss you,
Missy, rest in peace.
John Rocks-on-Rocks.
The Young Dillingers.
Freckles versus Baby Tim.
Cabalou stuttering,
i-m-m-mi-t-ta-ting Johnny Lips.
Hillbilly, Lefty, Itchy and Skip.
Dootie Bug’s first
baby’s mama, leaving.
Tootie had Fin.
At a party, I met a mercenary. He had fought Communists in Afghanistan before fighting Communists in Nicaragua. He described a process invented by the Russians to strip the skin off Afghan rebels. “It was psychological warfare disguised as chemical warfare,” he said. “The Moslem believes in the ‘pure warrior,’ sanctity of the body, that sort of thing. When he saw row after row of bodies with the skin peeling off, he went mad.” The mercenary drank his champagne. “A Moslem believes the skinless soul is doomed. Gone to hell.”