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.
There are no limits to our verbs, our forms:
think of the knife
that slits an orange or bundled iris stems, the one strapped
to the rooster’s varnished spur. The dagger, poniard, dirk.
Edge that snips the line, whittles an owl, juliennes, traces a lip.
A cut, an incision, a gouge. In Sudan, the story goes, when the slogan
of reform was The Future’s in Your Hands, men scavenged the streets
waving machetes, hacking off hands above the wrist, asking
How will you hold the future now? The stiletto, the skean, the scythe,
The choosing, the mark, the tool. Beneath a concrete bridge,
shirtless & drunk, a boy works his way through the swallows’ nests,
slashing until each mud cone-shape drops into the river, dissolves.
Yet to say so is hardly enough. To say pigsticker’s, bayonet, shiv.
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.
Whitman kept all the sleepers to himself but one, & she wasn’t just a demon
in the sack. When she wasn’t sleeping by daylight, she was the demon
slinging a house shoe at her children over the front seat of the Plymouth
while simultaneously steering it between the orgasmic, careening semis &
Beetle Bug Blue, Piddiddle, Beetle Bug Black.
A planeload of insurance salesmen, blown off course,
Discovers a tribe who believe an elephant-
In-the-distance is the same size as a gnat-in-the-eye.
This should cause trouble in a hunt. But tribespeople
Merely flick the pesky trumpeter away,
While the gnat – felled by clouds of arrows – feeds
The tribe for weeks. Faced by a lion, tribesmen run
Until its head is small enough to squish. Muscular
Warriors are found dead, pierced by mosquito-needles
Ear-to-ear. Everything here is as it seems.
The stick-in-water, drawn out, remains crooked
As a boomerang. Mountain and molehill are identical.
Tragedies that crush Americans – love’s waterbed
Popping, parents dropped into the scalding pot of age-
Require only that the sufferer walk away. “It’s not so awful,”
Tribal healers say. “With every step, troubles shrink;
Their howling dwindles to a buzz; their fangs shrivel to the size
Of pollen grains. Reach out. Brush them away. You see?”
We at school knew Mr. and Mrs. Cuts come from a family that eats children. There is a red metal tree with plastic-wrapped toys in the window and a long candy counter case to lure you in. Mr. and Mrs. Cuts have no children of their own. They ate them during a hard winter and salted the rest down for sandwiches the colored boy runs out to the pulpwood crew at noon. I count colored children going in to buy some candy to see how many make it back out, but generally our mother is ready to go home before I can tell. Our credit at Cuts is short.
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.
There are no limits to our verbs, our forms:
think of the knife
that slits an orange or bundled iris stems, the one strapped
to the rooster’s varnished spur. The dagger, poniard, dirk.
Edge that snips the line, whittles an owl, juliennes, traces a lip.
A cut, an incision, a gouge. In Sudan, the story goes, when the slogan
of reform was The Future’s in Your Hands, men scavenged the streets
waving machetes, hacking off hands above the wrist, asking
How will you hold the future now? The stiletto, the skean, the scythe,
The choosing, the mark, the tool. Beneath a concrete bridge,
shirtless & drunk, a boy works his way through the swallows’ nests,
slashing until each mud cone-shape drops into the river, dissolves.
Yet to say so is hardly enough. To say pigsticker’s, bayonet, shiv.
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.
Whitman kept all the sleepers to himself but one, & she wasn’t just a demon
in the sack. When she wasn’t sleeping by daylight, she was the demon
slinging a house shoe at her children over the front seat of the Plymouth
while simultaneously steering it between the orgasmic, careening semis &
Beetle Bug Blue, Piddiddle, Beetle Bug Black.
A planeload of insurance salesmen, blown off course,
Discovers a tribe who believe an elephant-
In-the-distance is the same size as a gnat-in-the-eye.
This should cause trouble in a hunt. But tribespeople
Merely flick the pesky trumpeter away,
While the gnat – felled by clouds of arrows – feeds
The tribe for weeks. Faced by a lion, tribesmen run
Until its head is small enough to squish. Muscular
Warriors are found dead, pierced by mosquito-needles
Ear-to-ear. Everything here is as it seems.
The stick-in-water, drawn out, remains crooked
As a boomerang. Mountain and molehill are identical.
Tragedies that crush Americans – love’s waterbed
Popping, parents dropped into the scalding pot of age-
Require only that the sufferer walk away. “It’s not so awful,”
Tribal healers say. “With every step, troubles shrink;
Their howling dwindles to a buzz; their fangs shrivel to the size
Of pollen grains. Reach out. Brush them away. You see?”
We at school knew Mr. and Mrs. Cuts come from a family that eats children. There is a red metal tree with plastic-wrapped toys in the window and a long candy counter case to lure you in. Mr. and Mrs. Cuts have no children of their own. They ate them during a hard winter and salted the rest down for sandwiches the colored boy runs out to the pulpwood crew at noon. I count colored children going in to buy some candy to see how many make it back out, but generally our mother is ready to go home before I can tell. Our credit at Cuts is short.
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.