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 saw inside the body of a man. The intern drew me
through the otherwise locked door; still in my hands
were eight glass vials the pharmacist had sent for,
to keep the glittering permanganate. That was my favorite task,
the weighing and dilution of the violet douche,
administered before the hysterectomies. In autopsy, he’d opened
like a box his arms had fallen from, neither looking at me
or away. As if he’d come through wind,
his hair was mussed. There was a funnel and a drain
inside the floor. And today I saw a sidewalk in the woods,
the handsome wooden cages and the smallest gravel pearls
smoothed around the bottoms of the trees, and then
a shock of feathers lifted on the damaged eagle’s head.
And the kestrel was afraid. Its open wing, so rarely looked down on
is gray, rust, black, and gray again, and black, and I have,
once today, felt my body drawn across its gaze. That one
with the vivid dragging wing, and then from underneath
I felt the other hovering.
Egrets picketing the spines of cattle in fields edged
with common tansy. Flowers my father gathered
for my mother to chew. To induce abortion. A common,
cosmopolitan agnostoid lithofacies naked in the foothills. I love
the character of your intelligence, its cast as well as pitch.
Border wide without marginal spines. At high angles
to the inferred shoreline.
“You aren’t one of those voodoo inspectors, are you? Don’t need to see anything, you just feel it, right? I heard Jimmy make jokes about you witch doctors.”
She says, “Intuitionist.” Lila Mae rubs the ballpoint of the pen to get the ink flowing. The W of her initials belongs to a ghost alphabet.
The super grins. “If that’s the game you want to play,” he says, “I guess you got me on the ropes.” There are three twenty-dollar bills in his oily palm. He leans over to Lila Mae and places the money in her breast pocket. Pats it down. “I haven’t ever seen a woman elevator inspector before, let alone a colored one, but I guess they teach you all the same tricks.”
The Banker trails behind me with his abacus
and crowd of yes-men. I hear
the gold coins rub together in his vest.
The stoplights remind me. And the scars
on my ankles and the nails in my mouth.
Once my father pointed his finger at me.
Once my mother kissed me on the lips in winter.
I could have been a man like those men
on the roof, eyes narrowed at me
like diamond cutters. In surgical gowns
and crucifix tie clips, tight bands of wires
wound beneath their chests –
they remind me of me. All in sync
they cup their ears to the antenna.
Quiet. The Jew Levine is coming to collect
with his chisels and his sack of flesh.
A man and a woman
are lying together
listening to news of a war.
The radio dial
is the only light in the room.
Casualties are read out.
He thinks, “Those are people
I no longer have to love,”
and he touches her hair
and calls her name
but it sounds strange to her
like a stone left over
from a house already built.
When I bent down to stack the papers, I thought the sensation I had had in my brain earlier was the same sensation I had once felt when I shook a pomegranate near my ear. Or, not exactly a sensation, but a sound. That when I shook the pomegranate it had made the same sound as the sound my blood made when it swiveled in my brain, and that both sounds led to the same sensation: of something having dissolved where it shouldn’t have. I went over the memory, from when I picked up the pomegranate to when I shook it near my ear: I had squeezed the pomegranate by rolling it, had pressed into it with my thumbs, juiced it without cracking it open, because it’s the only way to juice a pomegranate without any special machines. All the juice was swiveling about inside the shell of the pomegranate, channeling its way around the seeds the way river water channels itself around driftwood. When I put the pomegranate down I could still hear the juice working its way around the seeds that were dead without their pulp. I had squeezed the pomegranate till the pulp was dead. I could invent a machine to juice pomegranates, I thought, and not just pomegranates but persimmons too, some very basic, cheap tool people could use in their homes, and then I imagined a thousand people, all wearing their house slippers, juicing their pomegranates and persimmons for breakfast, and I thought, never mind, no doubt someone has already invented it.
I saw inside the body of a man. The intern drew me
through the otherwise locked door; still in my hands
were eight glass vials the pharmacist had sent for,
to keep the glittering permanganate. That was my favorite task,
the weighing and dilution of the violet douche,
administered before the hysterectomies. In autopsy, he’d opened
like a box his arms had fallen from, neither looking at me
or away. As if he’d come through wind,
his hair was mussed. There was a funnel and a drain
inside the floor. And today I saw a sidewalk in the woods,
the handsome wooden cages and the smallest gravel pearls
smoothed around the bottoms of the trees, and then
a shock of feathers lifted on the damaged eagle’s head.
And the kestrel was afraid. Its open wing, so rarely looked down on
is gray, rust, black, and gray again, and black, and I have,
once today, felt my body drawn across its gaze. That one
with the vivid dragging wing, and then from underneath
I felt the other hovering.
Egrets picketing the spines of cattle in fields edged
with common tansy. Flowers my father gathered
for my mother to chew. To induce abortion. A common,
cosmopolitan agnostoid lithofacies naked in the foothills. I love
the character of your intelligence, its cast as well as pitch.
Border wide without marginal spines. At high angles
to the inferred shoreline.
“You aren’t one of those voodoo inspectors, are you? Don’t need to see anything, you just feel it, right? I heard Jimmy make jokes about you witch doctors.”
She says, “Intuitionist.” Lila Mae rubs the ballpoint of the pen to get the ink flowing. The W of her initials belongs to a ghost alphabet.
The super grins. “If that’s the game you want to play,” he says, “I guess you got me on the ropes.” There are three twenty-dollar bills in his oily palm. He leans over to Lila Mae and places the money in her breast pocket. Pats it down. “I haven’t ever seen a woman elevator inspector before, let alone a colored one, but I guess they teach you all the same tricks.”
The Banker trails behind me with his abacus
and crowd of yes-men. I hear
the gold coins rub together in his vest.
The stoplights remind me. And the scars
on my ankles and the nails in my mouth.
Once my father pointed his finger at me.
Once my mother kissed me on the lips in winter.
I could have been a man like those men
on the roof, eyes narrowed at me
like diamond cutters. In surgical gowns
and crucifix tie clips, tight bands of wires
wound beneath their chests –
they remind me of me. All in sync
they cup their ears to the antenna.
Quiet. The Jew Levine is coming to collect
with his chisels and his sack of flesh.
A man and a woman
are lying together
listening to news of a war.
The radio dial
is the only light in the room.
Casualties are read out.
He thinks, “Those are people
I no longer have to love,”
and he touches her hair
and calls her name
but it sounds strange to her
like a stone left over
from a house already built.
When I bent down to stack the papers, I thought the sensation I had had in my brain earlier was the same sensation I had once felt when I shook a pomegranate near my ear. Or, not exactly a sensation, but a sound. That when I shook the pomegranate it had made the same sound as the sound my blood made when it swiveled in my brain, and that both sounds led to the same sensation: of something having dissolved where it shouldn’t have. I went over the memory, from when I picked up the pomegranate to when I shook it near my ear: I had squeezed the pomegranate by rolling it, had pressed into it with my thumbs, juiced it without cracking it open, because it’s the only way to juice a pomegranate without any special machines. All the juice was swiveling about inside the shell of the pomegranate, channeling its way around the seeds the way river water channels itself around driftwood. When I put the pomegranate down I could still hear the juice working its way around the seeds that were dead without their pulp. I had squeezed the pomegranate till the pulp was dead. I could invent a machine to juice pomegranates, I thought, and not just pomegranates but persimmons too, some very basic, cheap tool people could use in their homes, and then I imagined a thousand people, all wearing their house slippers, juicing their pomegranates and persimmons for breakfast, and I thought, never mind, no doubt someone has already invented it.