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’ll make you a saint
from an unblemished code book
that must be read
in a German restaurant
where beer is served in glasses
wrapped in brown leather
when the cuckoo strikes twelve
this will be the moment
of ascension
“YOU COME WITH ME NOW,” Uma madam says one day, after breakfast. She has come prepared. A male guard comes forward and grabs my arm.
“Where?” I say, wrenching free. He lets go. “Stop it! I need to talk to Gobind about the appeals.”
“You walk or he will drag you,” says Uma madam in reply.
Back in my cell, I gather my sleeping mat, my other salwar kameez, slip my feet into the rubber slippers, then look around for anything else that is mine. Nothing is.
Uma madam pulls my dupatta off my neck. When I grab at it, she clicks her tongue. “What use is modesty for you anymore?” she says.
We walk down the corridor, the three of us, and a few women look up from inside their cells. The corridor is so dim they are no more than movement, shapes, smells, a belch. Perhaps sensing my fear, Uma madam finds it in her heart to explain. “You can’t have a dupatta in this place where you are going. Not allowed. What if you decide to hang yourself, what then? It has happened before.” After a pause, she says, “Nobody’s coming to see you, don’t worry about looking nice.”
Uma madam unlocks a door at the far end of the corridor, which opens onto a staircase I have never seen. Though the day is dry and sunny, there is a puddle of water on the top step.
“Go down,” she says.
When I don’t move, she insists, “Go! Don’t look so afraid, we don’t keep tigers down there.”
I climb down, my slippers slapping the steps.
My mother supports an agency that every week or so sends her a list of the world’s political prisoners who are known to be in immediate danger of their lives. She sits over a chunky Adler typewriter and composes polite pleas to jailors and torturers and killers on behalf of their victims. “In the name of liberty, of decency, Your Excellency…”
These petitions for pity and reason, strangled as they are by formality, necessarily without anger, she types on personal stationery of pale yellow or pale tangerine or aqua—the kind got at a pharmacy. Her bursitis makes the typing difficult, and the text is unevenly imprinted, since some of the keys have more bite than others, the way she works them. All the same, her handwriting is impossible.
Boy now, man later; and all the story in between:
Yes breaking down to No, joy to pain.
Milk now, meat later; separation, fuse.
Swim the river rising and with patience take your aim.
Miss once, miss again; and your whole life seems a waste.
The target is yourself becoming brave.
Who soon, who later? – whatever happens next –
Someday you’ll lose us in the in-between.
Alone in a London museum, I saw a watercolor of twin
flames, one black, one a gauzy red,
only to learn the title is Boats at Sea. It's like how
sometimes I forget you're gone.
But it's not like that, is it? Not at all. When in this world
similes carry us nowhere.
And now I see again the boy pelting through those galleries
a boy not you, a flash of red, red, chasing, or being chased—
Or did I invent him? Mischief companion. Brother.
Listen to me
plead for your life though even in the dream I know you're
already dead.
How do I insure my desire for grief is never satisfied? Was
Priam's ever?
I tell my friend, I want the page itself to burn.
Later, when O’Neil imagines the accident—in the days and weeks that follow, and then for years to come—he imagines that it occurs in silence, and that his parents’ eyes are closed. Their eyes are closed like children asleep in a car at night, their faces and bodies in perfect, trusting repose, his father at the wheel, his mother beside him, and though it makes no sense to think it, he sees them holding hands—as O’Neil will one day hold his daughter’s hand when a nightmare has awakened her, to tell her that he is there beside her, that in sleep we have nothing to fear.
I’ll make you a saint
from an unblemished code book
that must be read
in a German restaurant
where beer is served in glasses
wrapped in brown leather
when the cuckoo strikes twelve
this will be the moment
of ascension
“YOU COME WITH ME NOW,” Uma madam says one day, after breakfast. She has come prepared. A male guard comes forward and grabs my arm.
“Where?” I say, wrenching free. He lets go. “Stop it! I need to talk to Gobind about the appeals.”
“You walk or he will drag you,” says Uma madam in reply.
Back in my cell, I gather my sleeping mat, my other salwar kameez, slip my feet into the rubber slippers, then look around for anything else that is mine. Nothing is.
Uma madam pulls my dupatta off my neck. When I grab at it, she clicks her tongue. “What use is modesty for you anymore?” she says.
We walk down the corridor, the three of us, and a few women look up from inside their cells. The corridor is so dim they are no more than movement, shapes, smells, a belch. Perhaps sensing my fear, Uma madam finds it in her heart to explain. “You can’t have a dupatta in this place where you are going. Not allowed. What if you decide to hang yourself, what then? It has happened before.” After a pause, she says, “Nobody’s coming to see you, don’t worry about looking nice.”
Uma madam unlocks a door at the far end of the corridor, which opens onto a staircase I have never seen. Though the day is dry and sunny, there is a puddle of water on the top step.
“Go down,” she says.
When I don’t move, she insists, “Go! Don’t look so afraid, we don’t keep tigers down there.”
I climb down, my slippers slapping the steps.
My mother supports an agency that every week or so sends her a list of the world’s political prisoners who are known to be in immediate danger of their lives. She sits over a chunky Adler typewriter and composes polite pleas to jailors and torturers and killers on behalf of their victims. “In the name of liberty, of decency, Your Excellency…”
These petitions for pity and reason, strangled as they are by formality, necessarily without anger, she types on personal stationery of pale yellow or pale tangerine or aqua—the kind got at a pharmacy. Her bursitis makes the typing difficult, and the text is unevenly imprinted, since some of the keys have more bite than others, the way she works them. All the same, her handwriting is impossible.
Boy now, man later; and all the story in between:
Yes breaking down to No, joy to pain.
Milk now, meat later; separation, fuse.
Swim the river rising and with patience take your aim.
Miss once, miss again; and your whole life seems a waste.
The target is yourself becoming brave.
Who soon, who later? – whatever happens next –
Someday you’ll lose us in the in-between.
Alone in a London museum, I saw a watercolor of twin
flames, one black, one a gauzy red,
only to learn the title is Boats at Sea. It's like how
sometimes I forget you're gone.
But it's not like that, is it? Not at all. When in this world
similes carry us nowhere.
And now I see again the boy pelting through those galleries
a boy not you, a flash of red, red, chasing, or being chased—
Or did I invent him? Mischief companion. Brother.
Listen to me
plead for your life though even in the dream I know you're
already dead.
How do I insure my desire for grief is never satisfied? Was
Priam's ever?
I tell my friend, I want the page itself to burn.
Later, when O’Neil imagines the accident—in the days and weeks that follow, and then for years to come—he imagines that it occurs in silence, and that his parents’ eyes are closed. Their eyes are closed like children asleep in a car at night, their faces and bodies in perfect, trusting repose, his father at the wheel, his mother beside him, and though it makes no sense to think it, he sees them holding hands—as O’Neil will one day hold his daughter’s hand when a nightmare has awakened her, to tell her that he is there beside her, that in sleep we have nothing to fear.