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.
MERRICK
(resumptive)
So that's why I'm running. To dismantle the institutions that have enslaved us and humiliated us and conned us out of our money for far too long.
WATSON
You're running for election to the government so you can dismantle the government?
MERRICK
(no hesitation, total confidence)
Yes.
WATSON smiles pleasantly.
WATSON
Cool. Good luck.
A Child is Like a Clarinet
for Eliza Harris and Henri Akoka
Similes are dangerous.
To equate a person to
an object, an instrument
no less, is a risk.
A child is like a clarinet.
A mother is like a clarinetist.
Personhood posits
promising possibilities.
Poems are willing to die.
Poems dare, just as Eliza
Harris leaped onto pieces
of ice to cross the frozen
Ohio River with her baby
in her hands. Poems flee,
just as Henri Akoka
jumped onto the top of
a moving train with his
clarinet under his arm.
One of these things
is not like the other.
Can’t you tell? Mouthpiece
from lips, flesh from wood.
I think it was near one o’clock in the morning. Retching blood, Botho jerked his head back and forth, then lurched forward as though loosing his earthly form. This was followed by a sharp intake of breath, as though he was trying to suck it back in again. The bullet had lodged near his shoulder; it had not damaged his throat, and he could still utter, “I’ll pay the devil my soul twice over to watch you hang.” That sentence seemed to take an eternity to work its way through. I all but felt his grimace clamp down on my heart; blood bubbled along his lips.
Faye fell to the deck in slow motion. It took forever for this part to end. “Hold still,” he warned as he cut her out of her clothes, the blade cool against her belly. “You won’t be needing these,” he said, and she knew rape wasn’t the last thing. She knew he intended to kill. That was next, when he had done with her. It meant something to him to know he was disgusting her now, hurting her, terrorizing her, it was why he did it, why he kept his eyes on her face, as he labored over her, his good arm corded and trembling, the point of the knife at her throat. She stared up past him to the square of sky framed by the hatch, waiting for it to be over, this now, waiting for the next thing, her next chance, her last chance.
… I used to love it when it would rain in Los Angeles. I felt that the city was made suddenly reflective by the rain, that it was being coated in another, deeper layer of what it was by the falling moisture. It made me sad and that pleased me. It was a moment of relief from what I took to be the exhausting project of pretending to be happy all of the time.
He sent this key from Florida.
I think. A key to what?
I tried the car, the trucks,
tried every door – nothing fit.
My wife thought it was his idea
of a joke. I never got his jokes.
Not a word from him, just things:
a blank postcard from Colorado Springs;
a snapshot of himself from Aspen,
arm in arm with somebody, but
both faces had been scissored out.
A sign above the bar said SHIT HAPPENS.
Eugene, Spokane… He’s telephone,
collect, and I knew it was him,
though he always used a different name.
At times enough to make you laugh:
Call from Hans, Ricardo, Jeff,
will you accept? Yes. Dial tone.
MERRICK
(resumptive)
So that's why I'm running. To dismantle the institutions that have enslaved us and humiliated us and conned us out of our money for far too long.
WATSON
You're running for election to the government so you can dismantle the government?
MERRICK
(no hesitation, total confidence)
Yes.
WATSON smiles pleasantly.
WATSON
Cool. Good luck.
A Child is Like a Clarinet
for Eliza Harris and Henri Akoka
Similes are dangerous.
To equate a person to
an object, an instrument
no less, is a risk.
A child is like a clarinet.
A mother is like a clarinetist.
Personhood posits
promising possibilities.
Poems are willing to die.
Poems dare, just as Eliza
Harris leaped onto pieces
of ice to cross the frozen
Ohio River with her baby
in her hands. Poems flee,
just as Henri Akoka
jumped onto the top of
a moving train with his
clarinet under his arm.
One of these things
is not like the other.
Can’t you tell? Mouthpiece
from lips, flesh from wood.
I think it was near one o’clock in the morning. Retching blood, Botho jerked his head back and forth, then lurched forward as though loosing his earthly form. This was followed by a sharp intake of breath, as though he was trying to suck it back in again. The bullet had lodged near his shoulder; it had not damaged his throat, and he could still utter, “I’ll pay the devil my soul twice over to watch you hang.” That sentence seemed to take an eternity to work its way through. I all but felt his grimace clamp down on my heart; blood bubbled along his lips.
Faye fell to the deck in slow motion. It took forever for this part to end. “Hold still,” he warned as he cut her out of her clothes, the blade cool against her belly. “You won’t be needing these,” he said, and she knew rape wasn’t the last thing. She knew he intended to kill. That was next, when he had done with her. It meant something to him to know he was disgusting her now, hurting her, terrorizing her, it was why he did it, why he kept his eyes on her face, as he labored over her, his good arm corded and trembling, the point of the knife at her throat. She stared up past him to the square of sky framed by the hatch, waiting for it to be over, this now, waiting for the next thing, her next chance, her last chance.
… I used to love it when it would rain in Los Angeles. I felt that the city was made suddenly reflective by the rain, that it was being coated in another, deeper layer of what it was by the falling moisture. It made me sad and that pleased me. It was a moment of relief from what I took to be the exhausting project of pretending to be happy all of the time.
He sent this key from Florida.
I think. A key to what?
I tried the car, the trucks,
tried every door – nothing fit.
My wife thought it was his idea
of a joke. I never got his jokes.
Not a word from him, just things:
a blank postcard from Colorado Springs;
a snapshot of himself from Aspen,
arm in arm with somebody, but
both faces had been scissored out.
A sign above the bar said SHIT HAPPENS.
Eugene, Spokane… He’s telephone,
collect, and I knew it was him,
though he always used a different name.
At times enough to make you laugh:
Call from Hans, Ricardo, Jeff,
will you accept? Yes. Dial tone.