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 was an old buzka on Luther Street known as the Cat Woman, not because she kept cats but because she disposed of the neighborhood’s excess kittens. Fathers would bring them in cardboard boxes at night after the children were asleep and she would drown them in her wash machine. The wash machine was in the basement, an ancient model with a galvanized-metal tub that stood on legs and had a wringer. A thick cord connected it to a socket that hung from the ceiling and when she turned it on the light bulb in the basement would flicker and water begin to pour.
Rachel comes to the porch holding herself and asking for
my uncle. We say he gone to the store but he’s years dead.
She keeps holding on to herself like her body remembers
what her mind lost. When he get back, tell him he owe me $5.
We offer to pay. She says, No. Tell him.
Maybe he pictured just the nail,
the slight swirl in the center of the head and raised
the hammer, and brought it down with fury and with skill
and sank it with a single blow.
Not a difficult truck for a journeyman, no harder
than figuring stairs or a hip-and-valley roof
or staking out a lot, but neither is a house,
a house is just a box fastened with thousands of nails.
Child or woman. Memory or need. Today, again, I can see you
in her eyes, today her eyes again pursue the ground, look
for some sign, some path to follow away from her route.
Her sweatshirt is zipped to the throat and I am realizing that
we are both then, somehow ashamed of what has suddenly happened
between us. And I’m slowing down a little, as if to let
the spring sun catch up to these hands on the steering wheel,
to these hands that will not ever stop needing breasts to
make them hands, as if to uncover my mouth
and yell across the lawns to her.
Though I cannot lavish praise on stamina
alone, I must acknowledge a femme
fortitude. Last night, I tell myself,
a misstep at battery’s expense
so as to never consider the sentience
of a pleasure machine.
How her trembling must have lullabied
my drunk tongue the intricacies
of sexual decorum even in sleep,
how she may have throbbed
all night beside me, anticipating her
own reciprocal and tender invasion.
The police ask me to empty my pockets. I turn them inside out and lay my miserabilia on the table. Two policemen quite unashamedly feel my thighs and ass, which tickles me. With clinical concentration they examine the stuff on the table. It is an obscene invasion of my privacy, more so than if they had turned my asshole inside out and inspected it under a microscope—any microbiologist could tell you that there we are remarkably similar. In pockets turned inside out you can see how we differ.
There was an old buzka on Luther Street known as the Cat Woman, not because she kept cats but because she disposed of the neighborhood’s excess kittens. Fathers would bring them in cardboard boxes at night after the children were asleep and she would drown them in her wash machine. The wash machine was in the basement, an ancient model with a galvanized-metal tub that stood on legs and had a wringer. A thick cord connected it to a socket that hung from the ceiling and when she turned it on the light bulb in the basement would flicker and water begin to pour.
Rachel comes to the porch holding herself and asking for
my uncle. We say he gone to the store but he’s years dead.
She keeps holding on to herself like her body remembers
what her mind lost. When he get back, tell him he owe me $5.
We offer to pay. She says, No. Tell him.
Maybe he pictured just the nail,
the slight swirl in the center of the head and raised
the hammer, and brought it down with fury and with skill
and sank it with a single blow.
Not a difficult truck for a journeyman, no harder
than figuring stairs or a hip-and-valley roof
or staking out a lot, but neither is a house,
a house is just a box fastened with thousands of nails.
Child or woman. Memory or need. Today, again, I can see you
in her eyes, today her eyes again pursue the ground, look
for some sign, some path to follow away from her route.
Her sweatshirt is zipped to the throat and I am realizing that
we are both then, somehow ashamed of what has suddenly happened
between us. And I’m slowing down a little, as if to let
the spring sun catch up to these hands on the steering wheel,
to these hands that will not ever stop needing breasts to
make them hands, as if to uncover my mouth
and yell across the lawns to her.
Though I cannot lavish praise on stamina
alone, I must acknowledge a femme
fortitude. Last night, I tell myself,
a misstep at battery’s expense
so as to never consider the sentience
of a pleasure machine.
How her trembling must have lullabied
my drunk tongue the intricacies
of sexual decorum even in sleep,
how she may have throbbed
all night beside me, anticipating her
own reciprocal and tender invasion.
The police ask me to empty my pockets. I turn them inside out and lay my miserabilia on the table. Two policemen quite unashamedly feel my thighs and ass, which tickles me. With clinical concentration they examine the stuff on the table. It is an obscene invasion of my privacy, more so than if they had turned my asshole inside out and inspected it under a microscope—any microbiologist could tell you that there we are remarkably similar. In pockets turned inside out you can see how we differ.