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.
My mother
gathers gladiolas. The gladness
is fractured. As when
the globe with its thousand mirrors
cracked the light. How
it hoarded sight: all the stolen perspectives
and the show of light
they shot around us: so that
down the dark hall the ghosts danced
with us: down the dark hall
the broken angels.
I don't trust nobody
but the land I said
I don't mean
present company
of course
you understand the grasses
hear me too always
present the grasses
confident grasses polite
command to shhhhh
shhh listen
I do not know how I need the air,
or if it needs me. The lost air,
the air which is smashed, like a red hat.
When the sun rises the amnesty
of the unused animals – the goat, the burrow,
the maroon horses - when the sun rises
the amnesty of these flies its flag: an orchard
with a thumb on top.
The shambles of the gods stretches for miles,
a salvage yard where the smell of hot chrome rises,
where finned bodies lie beached and rusting,
and their names recall great chiefs
and tribes and the empowering animals.
Thunderbird, Winnebago, Mustang, Pontiac –
you must say these names out loud. You must
strip the radios in which the myths survive.
Repeat: Wi-Yuh returns to abolish the custom of killing
the beasts for their names. Leave the road maps
on the dashboards. Learn the song of spawning fish.
The important thing, I suppose, is that this weekend was the first one we spent that wasn’t entirely at the state fair or big-brother Disneyland. It was the first time Daddy sort of ignored me like the Doctor, and I must confess that I had a better time than ever before on these custody junkets. It’s heavy pressure, you know, to find your role four days out of the month, a little two-day run every two weeks with no rehearsal. I suppose it was no fun for him, either, being the director as well as actor and still not getting it right. But that weekend he seemed a lot more regular in a way it’s hard to describe. I think that woman (Mike’s mother) looked sexy, for one thing, but that is strictly my unhaired opinion. At school the word is, you don’t know what girls really are until you have hair, kind of a Samson thing, I guess.
He climbed over the fence surrounding the Queen’s Pond, took off his clothes, and dived in, not caring whether a police squad would approach. The chill of water invigorated him as he waded through the lilies floating on top. He wondered how long it would take, if he allowed himself to sink, for the water to fill his lungs. He thought of monsters with long tentacles that supposedly lived at the bottom, and he imagined them tearing into his flesh. Would his wife be able to recognize the body?
My mother
gathers gladiolas. The gladness
is fractured. As when
the globe with its thousand mirrors
cracked the light. How
it hoarded sight: all the stolen perspectives
and the show of light
they shot around us: so that
down the dark hall the ghosts danced
with us: down the dark hall
the broken angels.
I don't trust nobody
but the land I said
I don't mean
present company
of course
you understand the grasses
hear me too always
present the grasses
confident grasses polite
command to shhhhh
shhh listen
I do not know how I need the air,
or if it needs me. The lost air,
the air which is smashed, like a red hat.
When the sun rises the amnesty
of the unused animals – the goat, the burrow,
the maroon horses - when the sun rises
the amnesty of these flies its flag: an orchard
with a thumb on top.
The shambles of the gods stretches for miles,
a salvage yard where the smell of hot chrome rises,
where finned bodies lie beached and rusting,
and their names recall great chiefs
and tribes and the empowering animals.
Thunderbird, Winnebago, Mustang, Pontiac –
you must say these names out loud. You must
strip the radios in which the myths survive.
Repeat: Wi-Yuh returns to abolish the custom of killing
the beasts for their names. Leave the road maps
on the dashboards. Learn the song of spawning fish.
The important thing, I suppose, is that this weekend was the first one we spent that wasn’t entirely at the state fair or big-brother Disneyland. It was the first time Daddy sort of ignored me like the Doctor, and I must confess that I had a better time than ever before on these custody junkets. It’s heavy pressure, you know, to find your role four days out of the month, a little two-day run every two weeks with no rehearsal. I suppose it was no fun for him, either, being the director as well as actor and still not getting it right. But that weekend he seemed a lot more regular in a way it’s hard to describe. I think that woman (Mike’s mother) looked sexy, for one thing, but that is strictly my unhaired opinion. At school the word is, you don’t know what girls really are until you have hair, kind of a Samson thing, I guess.
He climbed over the fence surrounding the Queen’s Pond, took off his clothes, and dived in, not caring whether a police squad would approach. The chill of water invigorated him as he waded through the lilies floating on top. He wondered how long it would take, if he allowed himself to sink, for the water to fill his lungs. He thought of monsters with long tentacles that supposedly lived at the bottom, and he imagined them tearing into his flesh. Would his wife be able to recognize the body?