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.
WOMAN 2: The first time I saw the devil was in the desert thirty-five kilometers north of Shaarm, a multi-national army base. The devil first appeared to me in the form of a huge scorpion but it took on many forms during our brief encounter, some of them insect, some of them human, and once as a desert turkey, which I came to prefer. The roof of meaning, at any rate, was gone.

Six monarch butterfly cocoons
Clinging to the back of your throat –
you could feel their gold wings trembling.
You were alarmed. You felt infested.
In the downstairs bathroom of the family home,
gagging to spit them out –
and a voice saying, Don’t, don’t –

Some of the prisoners were strung like beef
From the ceilings of their cells. “Gus”
Was led around on a leash. I mean dragged.
Others were ridden like mules. The guards
Were under a tremendous amount of pleasure.
I mean pressure. Pretty disgusting. Not
What you’d expect from Americans.
Just kidding. I’m only talking about people
Having a good time, blowing off steam.

There are the trash eaters: there are the diamond eaters. The diamond eaters are biblical; the trash eaters only so much in that they are lepers. I am on the side of the trash eaters, though I have eaten so many diamonds they are now poking through my skin. Everyone tries to figure out how to overcome the embarrassment of existing.

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.

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.

WOMAN 2: The first time I saw the devil was in the desert thirty-five kilometers north of Shaarm, a multi-national army base. The devil first appeared to me in the form of a huge scorpion but it took on many forms during our brief encounter, some of them insect, some of them human, and once as a desert turkey, which I came to prefer. The roof of meaning, at any rate, was gone.

Six monarch butterfly cocoons
Clinging to the back of your throat –
you could feel their gold wings trembling.
You were alarmed. You felt infested.
In the downstairs bathroom of the family home,
gagging to spit them out –
and a voice saying, Don’t, don’t –

Some of the prisoners were strung like beef
From the ceilings of their cells. “Gus”
Was led around on a leash. I mean dragged.
Others were ridden like mules. The guards
Were under a tremendous amount of pleasure.
I mean pressure. Pretty disgusting. Not
What you’d expect from Americans.
Just kidding. I’m only talking about people
Having a good time, blowing off steam.

There are the trash eaters: there are the diamond eaters. The diamond eaters are biblical; the trash eaters only so much in that they are lepers. I am on the side of the trash eaters, though I have eaten so many diamonds they are now poking through my skin. Everyone tries to figure out how to overcome the embarrassment of existing.

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.

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.
