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.
To be inside a body that’s going to go
is not so bad. A train rushes out of a station
and by the time it’s gone around the bend
that town is a tiny abandoned World of Tomorrow.
Passengers looking out of the train
see the windows of warehouses are the slow in a penny arcade
and they tell time by the clock face of every house.
Steel springs coil inside the trees.
Then the train will pull them down the tracks
they can’t invent fast enough for their need to survive.
Circling slow and dripping like a fat June bug in the rain,
turbos throbbing in the labored
dark over Chicago, the Electra turned, one wing
pivoted up, like an old dog tilted on three legs,
smelling dank, an old heaviness in him, as though
he were about to tumble over toward those glorious,
snowy lights below. There might have been
freezing sleet as well. In any case, I know
I laughed into a glass half filled with bourbon,
glanced again at the two feathered props
out the window, their cowlings charred and smoky.
But freed all at once from months of killing depression,
elated strangely, almost uplifted.
The dining room was empty. There were dragons – dragon ashtrays, dragon statues, dragons carved into posts. In a remarkably misguided attempt at décor, there was also a profusion of mirrors. The result was upsetting.
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.
His music swims in the room’s colors,
Not making the décor any prettier,
In its war of blood and tar;
His bleak tone blare into blackness
Of hard luck and lights.
Easier to sit in the front row
With your feet propped on stage
Than to play in a room where
Notes are harder to hold than a cheating lover.
As everyone heckles advice,
Somebody tells a fable about
Dignity and the failed attempt.
My grandmother owned a valise in which she carried all her possessions, but the stories she told were also possessions. The stories were fantastic, yet I believed them. She said that when she was young fireflies had invaded her town, so the whole town was lighted even during the nighttime. She said she had been told that the summer she was born, strange clouds passed through the sky. Every night for seven nights, a different cloud. The clouds all had a strange glow, as if someone had taken the moon and stretched it into a cloud shape. Those seven moon-clouds, she said, had been a lucky omen. As she spoke, she always gestured a great deal, so the background to her stories would be the soft tinkling of the bell we had bought her.
To be inside a body that’s going to go
is not so bad. A train rushes out of a station
and by the time it’s gone around the bend
that town is a tiny abandoned World of Tomorrow.
Passengers looking out of the train
see the windows of warehouses are the slow in a penny arcade
and they tell time by the clock face of every house.
Steel springs coil inside the trees.
Then the train will pull them down the tracks
they can’t invent fast enough for their need to survive.
Circling slow and dripping like a fat June bug in the rain,
turbos throbbing in the labored
dark over Chicago, the Electra turned, one wing
pivoted up, like an old dog tilted on three legs,
smelling dank, an old heaviness in him, as though
he were about to tumble over toward those glorious,
snowy lights below. There might have been
freezing sleet as well. In any case, I know
I laughed into a glass half filled with bourbon,
glanced again at the two feathered props
out the window, their cowlings charred and smoky.
But freed all at once from months of killing depression,
elated strangely, almost uplifted.
The dining room was empty. There were dragons – dragon ashtrays, dragon statues, dragons carved into posts. In a remarkably misguided attempt at décor, there was also a profusion of mirrors. The result was upsetting.
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.
His music swims in the room’s colors,
Not making the décor any prettier,
In its war of blood and tar;
His bleak tone blare into blackness
Of hard luck and lights.
Easier to sit in the front row
With your feet propped on stage
Than to play in a room where
Notes are harder to hold than a cheating lover.
As everyone heckles advice,
Somebody tells a fable about
Dignity and the failed attempt.
My grandmother owned a valise in which she carried all her possessions, but the stories she told were also possessions. The stories were fantastic, yet I believed them. She said that when she was young fireflies had invaded her town, so the whole town was lighted even during the nighttime. She said she had been told that the summer she was born, strange clouds passed through the sky. Every night for seven nights, a different cloud. The clouds all had a strange glow, as if someone had taken the moon and stretched it into a cloud shape. Those seven moon-clouds, she said, had been a lucky omen. As she spoke, she always gestured a great deal, so the background to her stories would be the soft tinkling of the bell we had bought her.