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.
The shambles of the gods stretches for miles,
a salvage yard where the smell of hot chrome rises,
where finned bodies lie beached and rusting,
and their names recall great chiefs
and tribes and the empowering animals.
Thunderbird, Winnebago, Mustang, Pontiac –
you must say these names out loud. You must
strip the radios in which the myths survive.
Repeat: Wi-Yuh returns to abolish the custom of killing
the beasts for their names. Leave the road maps
on the dashboards. Learn the song of spawning fish.
To live in the city of El Paso in those days was to hover at the edge of crushing and proximate cruelty, to safely fill the lungs with air steeped in horror. In news, in academic texts, in literature and art, El Paso’s twin city of Juárez was perpetually being presented as a place of murder and violence, a landscape of factories, maquiladoras, drug cartels, narcos, hit men, sicarios, delinquents, military, police, poverty, femicide, rape, kidnapping, disappearance, homicide, slaughter, massacre, shootings, gun fights, turf wars, mass graves, garbage dumps, impunity, corruption, decay, erosion, a hemispheric laboratory of social and economic horror. This representation—the narrative of a city irreparably fractured by its looming border, saddled with broken institutions and a terrorized populace—had become part and parcel of its legacy, the subconscious inheritance of all those who came into the city’s orbit.
From THE LINE BECOMES A RIVER by Francisco Cantu, to be published on February 6, 2018 by Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright (c) 2018 by Francisco Cantu.
REGGIE
Now see you gonna laugh. Cause you thank everythang I do is funny. It ain’t funny. It’s meant tah teach ya. How I speak? That’s meant tah teach you too. You get older ‘n leave this place...one thing ya gonna remember is the music of ya daddy’s voice. The memory ‘a what made ya. How ya people survived. An’ these little games we play? These little hand games? That’s your history too… ‘cause ya grandmama sat ya mama down when she was smaller ‘n you ‘n they played these games ‘n had the best time that ever was. Then, ya mama taught me ya know that? Shoot, I ain’t wanna learn no little girl games. Imma man! (Laughs.) What I look like playin’ some little girl hand game! But, then we had you. And I taught you. That’s a road map. You ever get lost, you find ya way back home (points to his chest) from them. Understand? And one way or another... I’ll come get you.
I
What a lucky beast I am,
when he cleans up nice
and nicks his perfect face.
I get to lick that face,
when he lets me.
In the cut’s opening
I get a taste of him
from the inside
out, which is all I have
ever wanted,
to be cell-close
to him. Praise the razor’s
overzealous arm;
the ease
with which it finds tenderness
in this man.
I wanted for her sake to undo it,
I asked her to forget. There wouldn’t be
time for us since I was married. I’d made her want
another time, when, whole, impossibly together,
we’d rescue my avowal, which was a curse.
Though I asked her not to, she went on
waiting for that time and, by the tree where I
couldn’t get away to meet her, waiting
undismayed, heartsick, eighteen.
Each pub has a barrel-rolling team. That makes ten teams. You wear fireproof gloves. The barrel is full of flaming tar. You have to see how long you can keep the barrel up in the air. It works like a relay. Four people on the team. You pass it to the next bloke when you get too hot and the barrel gets too heavy. You hold it high up above you and in your hands you rotate it; the flames shoot out into the crowd as you run down the streets. The people compact into themselves. You shout and the people duck down and run back and climb over each other and the flames shoot out at them and you laugh at the manic growls of fear and panic. There haven’t been more than a few deaths.
The shambles of the gods stretches for miles,
a salvage yard where the smell of hot chrome rises,
where finned bodies lie beached and rusting,
and their names recall great chiefs
and tribes and the empowering animals.
Thunderbird, Winnebago, Mustang, Pontiac –
you must say these names out loud. You must
strip the radios in which the myths survive.
Repeat: Wi-Yuh returns to abolish the custom of killing
the beasts for their names. Leave the road maps
on the dashboards. Learn the song of spawning fish.
To live in the city of El Paso in those days was to hover at the edge of crushing and proximate cruelty, to safely fill the lungs with air steeped in horror. In news, in academic texts, in literature and art, El Paso’s twin city of Juárez was perpetually being presented as a place of murder and violence, a landscape of factories, maquiladoras, drug cartels, narcos, hit men, sicarios, delinquents, military, police, poverty, femicide, rape, kidnapping, disappearance, homicide, slaughter, massacre, shootings, gun fights, turf wars, mass graves, garbage dumps, impunity, corruption, decay, erosion, a hemispheric laboratory of social and economic horror. This representation—the narrative of a city irreparably fractured by its looming border, saddled with broken institutions and a terrorized populace—had become part and parcel of its legacy, the subconscious inheritance of all those who came into the city’s orbit.
From THE LINE BECOMES A RIVER by Francisco Cantu, to be published on February 6, 2018 by Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright (c) 2018 by Francisco Cantu.
REGGIE
Now see you gonna laugh. Cause you thank everythang I do is funny. It ain’t funny. It’s meant tah teach ya. How I speak? That’s meant tah teach you too. You get older ‘n leave this place...one thing ya gonna remember is the music of ya daddy’s voice. The memory ‘a what made ya. How ya people survived. An’ these little games we play? These little hand games? That’s your history too… ‘cause ya grandmama sat ya mama down when she was smaller ‘n you ‘n they played these games ‘n had the best time that ever was. Then, ya mama taught me ya know that? Shoot, I ain’t wanna learn no little girl games. Imma man! (Laughs.) What I look like playin’ some little girl hand game! But, then we had you. And I taught you. That’s a road map. You ever get lost, you find ya way back home (points to his chest) from them. Understand? And one way or another... I’ll come get you.
I
What a lucky beast I am,
when he cleans up nice
and nicks his perfect face.
I get to lick that face,
when he lets me.
In the cut’s opening
I get a taste of him
from the inside
out, which is all I have
ever wanted,
to be cell-close
to him. Praise the razor’s
overzealous arm;
the ease
with which it finds tenderness
in this man.
I wanted for her sake to undo it,
I asked her to forget. There wouldn’t be
time for us since I was married. I’d made her want
another time, when, whole, impossibly together,
we’d rescue my avowal, which was a curse.
Though I asked her not to, she went on
waiting for that time and, by the tree where I
couldn’t get away to meet her, waiting
undismayed, heartsick, eighteen.
Each pub has a barrel-rolling team. That makes ten teams. You wear fireproof gloves. The barrel is full of flaming tar. You have to see how long you can keep the barrel up in the air. It works like a relay. Four people on the team. You pass it to the next bloke when you get too hot and the barrel gets too heavy. You hold it high up above you and in your hands you rotate it; the flames shoot out into the crowd as you run down the streets. The people compact into themselves. You shout and the people duck down and run back and climb over each other and the flames shoot out at them and you laugh at the manic growls of fear and panic. There haven’t been more than a few deaths.