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.
Please, excuse my shadow. I can’t
stop leaving. I don’t know how
to name what I don’t know
well enough to render
in a single sitting. Every poem
about us seems an impossible labor,
like forgetting the face
of the sea, or trying to find
a more perfect name for water.
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.
SARA
I don't think $20 is much for a bribe.
LOWELL
Isn't it? American? I was hoping it was a whole hell of a lot.
SARA
Maybe. Guys who work in airports make a lot of funny money different ways.
LOWELL
Oh but, oh, well. Yeah. Fuck. Well it was my first bribe.
I found a white stone on the beach
inlaid with a blue-green road I could not follow.
All night I’d slept in fits and starts,
my only memory the in-out, in-out, of the tide.
And then morning. And then a walk,
the white stone beckoning, glinting in the sun.
I felt its calm power as I held it
and wished a wish I cannot tell.
It fit in my hand like a hand gently
holding my hand through a sleepless night.
A stone so like, so unlike,
all the others it could only be mine.
The worldess white stone of my life!
Like the liftoff of an airliner, the stamping of auto body parts requires inhuman force, producing decibels registered by your internal organs. The presses sound, unmistakably, as if they could kill you, which they could, without much interrupting their normal functioning. You’d notice the collision more than they would.
Ivy ties the cellar door
in autumn, in summer morning glory
wraps the ribs of a mouse.
Love binds me to the one
whose hair I’ve found in my mouth,
whose sleeping head I kiss,
wondering is it death?
beauty? this dark
star spreading in every direction from the crown of her head.
My love’s hair is autumn hair, there
the sun ripens.
My fingers harvest the dark
vegetable of her body.
In the morning I remove it
from my tongue and
sleep again.
Please, excuse my shadow. I can’t
stop leaving. I don’t know how
to name what I don’t know
well enough to render
in a single sitting. Every poem
about us seems an impossible labor,
like forgetting the face
of the sea, or trying to find
a more perfect name for water.
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.
SARA
I don't think $20 is much for a bribe.
LOWELL
Isn't it? American? I was hoping it was a whole hell of a lot.
SARA
Maybe. Guys who work in airports make a lot of funny money different ways.
LOWELL
Oh but, oh, well. Yeah. Fuck. Well it was my first bribe.
I found a white stone on the beach
inlaid with a blue-green road I could not follow.
All night I’d slept in fits and starts,
my only memory the in-out, in-out, of the tide.
And then morning. And then a walk,
the white stone beckoning, glinting in the sun.
I felt its calm power as I held it
and wished a wish I cannot tell.
It fit in my hand like a hand gently
holding my hand through a sleepless night.
A stone so like, so unlike,
all the others it could only be mine.
The worldess white stone of my life!
Like the liftoff of an airliner, the stamping of auto body parts requires inhuman force, producing decibels registered by your internal organs. The presses sound, unmistakably, as if they could kill you, which they could, without much interrupting their normal functioning. You’d notice the collision more than they would.
Ivy ties the cellar door
in autumn, in summer morning glory
wraps the ribs of a mouse.
Love binds me to the one
whose hair I’ve found in my mouth,
whose sleeping head I kiss,
wondering is it death?
beauty? this dark
star spreading in every direction from the crown of her head.
My love’s hair is autumn hair, there
the sun ripens.
My fingers harvest the dark
vegetable of her body.
In the morning I remove it
from my tongue and
sleep again.