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.
A friend asks, “What are you waiting for?
The straw that breaks the camel’s back?”
Maybe I am the straw.
Maybe I am hay. I made a list of rhyming words:
Bray, flay, array.
They all seemed to relate to farms, decaying things,
gray days, dismay.
I am recently reckless about making a display
of my unhappiness. Perhaps you may survey it.
Perhaps I may stray from it, go to the wrong home
by accident and say, “Oh! Here already?”
You know I’m fraying and just watch it.
You don’t even try to braid me together.
Panther. Painter. Puma. Cougar. Mountain lion. Whatever you want to call it, by the end of October, half a dozen more people claim they have caught a glimpse of it: a pale sliver in the distance, a flash of fur through the trees. In the woods, hunters linger in their tree stands, hoping they might be the next. In the houses, the big cat creeps nightly, making the rounds of dinner tables and dreams.
The light made my skin look orange, and I started thinking about what Wickham had told us about light. She said that oranges and apples, leaves and flowers, the whole multicolored world, was not what it appeared to be. The colors we see, she said, look like they do only because of the light or ray that shines on them. “The color of the thing isn’t what you see but the light that’s reflected off it.” Then she shut out the lights and shone a white light on a prism. We watched the pale splay of colors on the projector screen; some people oohed and aahed. Suddenly, she switched on a black light and the color of everything changed. The prism colors vanished, Wickham’s arms were purple, the buttons of her dress were as orange as hot coals, rather than the blue they had been only seconds before. We were all very quiet. “Nothing,” she said, after a while, “is really what it appears to be.”
“He says, why should some people live like kings and the rest like rats? And why should the wealthy, enamored with Europe and the West, dictate how the whole country should dress, talk, live? What if we like our chadors and our Koran? What if we want our own mullahs to rule us, not that saint – what’s his name?” She taps her fingers on the dashboard, trying to remember the name. “ Morteza told me he is worshipped in Europe… I know! Saint Laurent, or something like that…”
“Yves Saint Laurent?” Farnaz laughs. “He’s not a saint, Habibeh. He’s a designer. That’s just his name.”
I have a garden in my brain
shaped like a maze
I lose myself
in, it seems. They only look for me
sometimes. I don’t like my dreams.
The nurses quarrel over where I am
hiding. I hear from inside
a bush. One is crisp
and cuts; one pinches. I’d like to push
them each somewhere.
They both think it’s funny
here. The laughter sounds like diesels.
I won’t come out because I’m lazy.
You start to like the needles.
You start to want to crazy.
Mountain tips soften after so much rain,
the wild guesses of birds blending with air
and the uppermost buds, with a godlike
promotion, burst open.
Especially beautiful
are the brown and drunken bats
who nosedive down the barnside,
not quite earthbroken.
A friend asks, “What are you waiting for?
The straw that breaks the camel’s back?”
Maybe I am the straw.
Maybe I am hay. I made a list of rhyming words:
Bray, flay, array.
They all seemed to relate to farms, decaying things,
gray days, dismay.
I am recently reckless about making a display
of my unhappiness. Perhaps you may survey it.
Perhaps I may stray from it, go to the wrong home
by accident and say, “Oh! Here already?”
You know I’m fraying and just watch it.
You don’t even try to braid me together.
Panther. Painter. Puma. Cougar. Mountain lion. Whatever you want to call it, by the end of October, half a dozen more people claim they have caught a glimpse of it: a pale sliver in the distance, a flash of fur through the trees. In the woods, hunters linger in their tree stands, hoping they might be the next. In the houses, the big cat creeps nightly, making the rounds of dinner tables and dreams.
The light made my skin look orange, and I started thinking about what Wickham had told us about light. She said that oranges and apples, leaves and flowers, the whole multicolored world, was not what it appeared to be. The colors we see, she said, look like they do only because of the light or ray that shines on them. “The color of the thing isn’t what you see but the light that’s reflected off it.” Then she shut out the lights and shone a white light on a prism. We watched the pale splay of colors on the projector screen; some people oohed and aahed. Suddenly, she switched on a black light and the color of everything changed. The prism colors vanished, Wickham’s arms were purple, the buttons of her dress were as orange as hot coals, rather than the blue they had been only seconds before. We were all very quiet. “Nothing,” she said, after a while, “is really what it appears to be.”
“He says, why should some people live like kings and the rest like rats? And why should the wealthy, enamored with Europe and the West, dictate how the whole country should dress, talk, live? What if we like our chadors and our Koran? What if we want our own mullahs to rule us, not that saint – what’s his name?” She taps her fingers on the dashboard, trying to remember the name. “ Morteza told me he is worshipped in Europe… I know! Saint Laurent, or something like that…”
“Yves Saint Laurent?” Farnaz laughs. “He’s not a saint, Habibeh. He’s a designer. That’s just his name.”
I have a garden in my brain
shaped like a maze
I lose myself
in, it seems. They only look for me
sometimes. I don’t like my dreams.
The nurses quarrel over where I am
hiding. I hear from inside
a bush. One is crisp
and cuts; one pinches. I’d like to push
them each somewhere.
They both think it’s funny
here. The laughter sounds like diesels.
I won’t come out because I’m lazy.
You start to like the needles.
You start to want to crazy.
Mountain tips soften after so much rain,
the wild guesses of birds blending with air
and the uppermost buds, with a godlike
promotion, burst open.
Especially beautiful
are the brown and drunken bats
who nosedive down the barnside,
not quite earthbroken.