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.
HOME IS WHERE
I peek from the slit
between my forearms.
Them. They come.
Eyes in all the heads glow.
The flow
melts my arm flesh
Burgundy vessels drip
from bone.
The graveyard this time of year is nice. Damp orange yellow red leaves pile at the headstones for pillows. Place my head in leaves. Soil moist and black like chocolate cake and taste like worms. Arms spread legs spread wind crawls up my pants leg to pocket soft backs of knees. Slightly arched back anchors shoulders to my throat, jaw, head. Eyes fixed to the blue grey. Meanwhile. An old deer limps over, sits like a dog, licks my shoes.
For me, to be a feminist is to answer the question “Are women human?” with a yes. It is not about whether women are better than, worse than or identical with men. And it’s certainly not about trading personal liberty – abortion, divorce, sexual self-expression—for social protection as wives and mothers, as pro-life feminists propose. It’s about justice, fairness and access to the broad range of human experience. It’s about women consulting their own well-being and being judged as individuals rather than as members of a class with one personality, one social function, one road to happiness. It’s about women having intrinsic value as persons rather than contingent value as a means to an end for others: fetuses, children, “the family,” men.
My mother had good hair, a term she would never use herself because, she said, it was so hurtful she couldn’t possibly believe it. But my mother’s hair was undeniably long and thick, a mass of loose curls that Callie and I did not inherit and that she was determined to cut off before we began our new life.
She tried to talk both of us into joining her, but only Callie took the bait. My mother got her with the promise of hair made so easy and simple, you could run your fingers through it. When it was all over, Callie was left with an outgrowth of stiff, sodden curls that clung in limp clusters to her forehead and the nape of her neck and made the back of her head smell like burning and sugar.
To remain :: is to grieve
:: is to answer
:: what side of the río
we crown
:: or
:: where your ancestors
Coffin
The man asks, Do you have a family? My thinking
brushes the air between us like a wet mark
stains white paper. My mother’s mother, dead
twenty-two years. A stone house. The ants I’ve killed.
Robyne, who, when someone hurls
toward me a small cruelty, cries. Memphis in August.
My twin brother crunching ice. All the cousins
I’ve made. Walking amongst cedar trees.
Leaning over me, she took my head into her hands,
the short hair thick still, full beneath her fingers.
She told me she had read that pressure (from
a rubber band about the head) combined with
lowered temperatures (from ice) would sometimes
keep the drugs from killing hair roots in the scalp.
I suffered numbness, ache from cold, for her,
for hope. She only had to try it once.
HOME IS WHERE
I peek from the slit
between my forearms.
Them. They come.
Eyes in all the heads glow.
The flow
melts my arm flesh
Burgundy vessels drip
from bone.
The graveyard this time of year is nice. Damp orange yellow red leaves pile at the headstones for pillows. Place my head in leaves. Soil moist and black like chocolate cake and taste like worms. Arms spread legs spread wind crawls up my pants leg to pocket soft backs of knees. Slightly arched back anchors shoulders to my throat, jaw, head. Eyes fixed to the blue grey. Meanwhile. An old deer limps over, sits like a dog, licks my shoes.
For me, to be a feminist is to answer the question “Are women human?” with a yes. It is not about whether women are better than, worse than or identical with men. And it’s certainly not about trading personal liberty – abortion, divorce, sexual self-expression—for social protection as wives and mothers, as pro-life feminists propose. It’s about justice, fairness and access to the broad range of human experience. It’s about women consulting their own well-being and being judged as individuals rather than as members of a class with one personality, one social function, one road to happiness. It’s about women having intrinsic value as persons rather than contingent value as a means to an end for others: fetuses, children, “the family,” men.
My mother had good hair, a term she would never use herself because, she said, it was so hurtful she couldn’t possibly believe it. But my mother’s hair was undeniably long and thick, a mass of loose curls that Callie and I did not inherit and that she was determined to cut off before we began our new life.
She tried to talk both of us into joining her, but only Callie took the bait. My mother got her with the promise of hair made so easy and simple, you could run your fingers through it. When it was all over, Callie was left with an outgrowth of stiff, sodden curls that clung in limp clusters to her forehead and the nape of her neck and made the back of her head smell like burning and sugar.
To remain :: is to grieve
:: is to answer
:: what side of the río
we crown
:: or
:: where your ancestors
Coffin
The man asks, Do you have a family? My thinking
brushes the air between us like a wet mark
stains white paper. My mother’s mother, dead
twenty-two years. A stone house. The ants I’ve killed.
Robyne, who, when someone hurls
toward me a small cruelty, cries. Memphis in August.
My twin brother crunching ice. All the cousins
I’ve made. Walking amongst cedar trees.
Leaning over me, she took my head into her hands,
the short hair thick still, full beneath her fingers.
She told me she had read that pressure (from
a rubber band about the head) combined with
lowered temperatures (from ice) would sometimes
keep the drugs from killing hair roots in the scalp.
I suffered numbness, ache from cold, for her,
for hope. She only had to try it once.