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.
I thought, I bet the daughter’s glad she’s dead, because what her mother was doing, throwing herself into the grave on top of the box like that, looked funny. It looked funny because her mother was fat, and it looked so much like the mother was doing the Fat Man Dance, because her arms were spread out too, as if she were waiting for her daughter to spread out her arms also, and then they could hold hands and smack bellies together and dance in circles on the box just the way we always did in the summer when we did the Fat Man Dance. Because we always did the Fat Man Dance in the summer when we ran around with no clothes on and danced a lot because it was summer.
You will begin to listen to the story of Josie’s life in Spanish and English. You will begin to like the way she looks. At moments you will confuse her with the stripper dancing naked on the table next to where the two of you talk. Josie will be telling you about her marriage, about her husband, about her divorce, about her daughter, about her sadness and disappointment. You will have more drinks than her.
“Recipe” from THE MAGIC OF BLOOD by Dagoberto Gilb © 1993 by the University of New Mexico Press; reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Atlantic, Inc. “Recipe” originally appeared in Winners on the Pass Line (Cinco Puntos Press).
There’s a man inside this woman, and he’s alive. But he can’t speak—she can’t speak—the face is peeled back, the skull empty, and now the cap of bone is being plastered back in place, and now the skin is being stitched shut. The autopsy is over—she’s closed, she’s done—and he’s still in there, with her, in another country, with the smell of shit and blood that’s never going to go away, and he’s not himself at all, he’s her, he’s Gloria Luby—bloated, full of gas, fat and white and dead forever.
Six monarch butterfly cocoons
Clinging to the back of your throat –
you could feel their gold wings trembling.
You were alarmed. You felt infested.
In the downstairs bathroom of the family home,
gagging to spit them out –
and a voice saying, Don’t, don’t –
From a side lane soft with lunar mulch
and thistledown I saw them, clipped alone
on a clothesline, a pair of diaphanous panties
as wide as an elephant’s forehead.
I sighed across the boy-mown lawn
and they shook as though they shed blessings
to the moon and her tongue-tied exiles.
Who would dare pour such panties
along his arms and throat? A murderer, maybe.
The Milky Way was pavement
compared to their luxury. I knew
I wouldn’t outwalk their whispers that night.
Next morning my feet felt like mallets.
I was back in the world where people
wear out, embarrassed by beautiful things,
and a garment fit for a goddess is nothing but big.
When Blair protested they hit him fairly hard in the stomach, and that was the moment he knew that his life had changed. They called him la merca, the merchandise, and for the next four days he slogged through the mountains eating cold arepas and sardines and taking endless taunts about firing squads, although he did, thanks to an eighty-mile-a-week running habit, hold up better than the oil executives and mining engineers the rebels were used to bringing in.
I thought, I bet the daughter’s glad she’s dead, because what her mother was doing, throwing herself into the grave on top of the box like that, looked funny. It looked funny because her mother was fat, and it looked so much like the mother was doing the Fat Man Dance, because her arms were spread out too, as if she were waiting for her daughter to spread out her arms also, and then they could hold hands and smack bellies together and dance in circles on the box just the way we always did in the summer when we did the Fat Man Dance. Because we always did the Fat Man Dance in the summer when we ran around with no clothes on and danced a lot because it was summer.
You will begin to listen to the story of Josie’s life in Spanish and English. You will begin to like the way she looks. At moments you will confuse her with the stripper dancing naked on the table next to where the two of you talk. Josie will be telling you about her marriage, about her husband, about her divorce, about her daughter, about her sadness and disappointment. You will have more drinks than her.
“Recipe” from THE MAGIC OF BLOOD by Dagoberto Gilb © 1993 by the University of New Mexico Press; reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Atlantic, Inc. “Recipe” originally appeared in Winners on the Pass Line (Cinco Puntos Press).
There’s a man inside this woman, and he’s alive. But he can’t speak—she can’t speak—the face is peeled back, the skull empty, and now the cap of bone is being plastered back in place, and now the skin is being stitched shut. The autopsy is over—she’s closed, she’s done—and he’s still in there, with her, in another country, with the smell of shit and blood that’s never going to go away, and he’s not himself at all, he’s her, he’s Gloria Luby—bloated, full of gas, fat and white and dead forever.
Six monarch butterfly cocoons
Clinging to the back of your throat –
you could feel their gold wings trembling.
You were alarmed. You felt infested.
In the downstairs bathroom of the family home,
gagging to spit them out –
and a voice saying, Don’t, don’t –
From a side lane soft with lunar mulch
and thistledown I saw them, clipped alone
on a clothesline, a pair of diaphanous panties
as wide as an elephant’s forehead.
I sighed across the boy-mown lawn
and they shook as though they shed blessings
to the moon and her tongue-tied exiles.
Who would dare pour such panties
along his arms and throat? A murderer, maybe.
The Milky Way was pavement
compared to their luxury. I knew
I wouldn’t outwalk their whispers that night.
Next morning my feet felt like mallets.
I was back in the world where people
wear out, embarrassed by beautiful things,
and a garment fit for a goddess is nothing but big.
When Blair protested they hit him fairly hard in the stomach, and that was the moment he knew that his life had changed. They called him la merca, the merchandise, and for the next four days he slogged through the mountains eating cold arepas and sardines and taking endless taunts about firing squads, although he did, thanks to an eighty-mile-a-week running habit, hold up better than the oil executives and mining engineers the rebels were used to bringing in.