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 live brokenly and assemble together
Weakly – from long bone of the arm, hip
Rollicking in its socket, and the jaw,
Its brux. From the lip of a wooden
Bowl carved from the knot of a limb
Drifted, my name was given on water
And laid down like hail upon my tongue.
It’s become a bewilderment of white –
It snows. It does snow. It is snowing.
As Isamina Belle confided later, when she stepped in her front door and saw her husband hanging from a rope tied to a joist, with his head bowed as if in prayer and his feet dangling inches from the floor, the first thing she did was to hasten and fling open all the windows in the house.
“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.
Coyotes invade. They claim to be the truth.
Black bears nose the bougainvillea, moving
eastward, indiscriminate, original.
Our sinks back up, our toilets will not drain,
our nature disobediently tends toward nature.
Prendergast painted the Public Garden;
remembered, even at a little distance,
the city takes on his ravishing tones.
Jots of color resolve: massed parasols
above a glimmering pond, the transit
of almost translucent swans. Brilliant bits
- jewels? slices of sugared fruit? – bloom
into a clutch of skirts on the bridge
above the summer boaters. His city’s essence:
all the hues of chintzes or makeup
or Italian ices, all the sheen artifice
is capable of. Our city’s lavish paintbox.
I live brokenly and assemble together
Weakly – from long bone of the arm, hip
Rollicking in its socket, and the jaw,
Its brux. From the lip of a wooden
Bowl carved from the knot of a limb
Drifted, my name was given on water
And laid down like hail upon my tongue.
It’s become a bewilderment of white –
It snows. It does snow. It is snowing.
I live brokenly and assemble together
Weakly – from long bone of the arm, hip
Rollicking in its socket, and the jaw,
Its brux. From the lip of a wooden
Bowl carved from the knot of a limb
Drifted, my name was given on water
And laid down like hail upon my tongue.
It’s become a bewilderment of white –
It snows. It does snow. It is snowing.
As Isamina Belle confided later, when she stepped in her front door and saw her husband hanging from a rope tied to a joist, with his head bowed as if in prayer and his feet dangling inches from the floor, the first thing she did was to hasten and fling open all the windows in the house.
“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.
Coyotes invade. They claim to be the truth.
Black bears nose the bougainvillea, moving
eastward, indiscriminate, original.
Our sinks back up, our toilets will not drain,
our nature disobediently tends toward nature.
Prendergast painted the Public Garden;
remembered, even at a little distance,
the city takes on his ravishing tones.
Jots of color resolve: massed parasols
above a glimmering pond, the transit
of almost translucent swans. Brilliant bits
- jewels? slices of sugared fruit? – bloom
into a clutch of skirts on the bridge
above the summer boaters. His city’s essence:
all the hues of chintzes or makeup
or Italian ices, all the sheen artifice
is capable of. Our city’s lavish paintbox.
I live brokenly and assemble together
Weakly – from long bone of the arm, hip
Rollicking in its socket, and the jaw,
Its brux. From the lip of a wooden
Bowl carved from the knot of a limb
Drifted, my name was given on water
And laid down like hail upon my tongue.
It’s become a bewilderment of white –
It snows. It does snow. It is snowing.