Search All Winners

While I sit with all the other patients in the waiting room, I always think that I will ask Dr. Wald what exactly is happening to my eyes, but when I go into his examining room alone it is dark, with a circle of light on the wall, and the doctor is standing with his back to me arranging silver instruments on a cloth. The big chair is empty for me to go sit in, and each time I feel as if I have gone into a dream straight from being awake, the way you do sometimes at night, and I go to the chair without saying anything.

As Frankel muses on Progress in his Hillman Minx, Ed Markowitz wearily drives a rented Fiat to the Oriental Institute. He had not wanted to go on the day of his arrival, but this is the only time he can be sure to see Mujahid Rashaf, who is returning to Saudi Arabia within the week. Rashaf is an Oxford fellow and the son of a merchant prince. He will provide just the reasoned yet religious opinions that Markowitz seeks for his book, Terrorism: A Civilized Creed.

I remembered the sweet powerful taste of pop. Tommy Feathers had stopped for coffee when he was hunting wolverine. He tossed a bulged red and white can on the chopping block. “You’ll have tat one springtime,” he joked. He was sober; that meant he was laughing and friendly, not frothing about naluagmius starving his family, stealing food out of his children’s mouths. We had sat around waiting for it to thaw. We could have bought pops in Takunak but according to Abe, pop cost money, wasted aluminum, and was bad for our teeth. Nothing for something. Why not drink water? Now Iris was describing the high school friends and fun we’d always worried we missed out on, and I wondered why I hadn’t bought myself a few Cokes.

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.

The photo showed a dog, standing on its hind legs, being helped from the door of a helicopter by a serious-looking man in a down vest. The dog seemed to stand about the same height as the man, and looked like a Malamute. The strange thing about it, besides its larger-than-average size, was the fact that it was wearing a dark-colored jacket which looked like part of an old-fashioned military uniform, and a pair of spectacles, and that it appeared to have hands instead of front paws. In one of those gloved hands it held a cane, which was pointed at an awkward angle, probably because of the way the man was holding on to that foreleg just above the elbow. The other hand gripped the side of the helicopter doorway. The expression on the animal’s face was one of terror. Its lips were slightly parted, its ears were pointing straight backward, and its eyes were wide.