Search All Winners

Two marriages:

            Clara and Fritz Haber: Clara finishes a doctorate in chemistry. She is the only woman at her school. She is brilliant but reserved. The first time Fritz proposes, she declines. The second time, she agrees. After they marry, he demands that Clara be a housewife and a mother, while he travels for work. When war breaks out in 1918, he proves his patriotism through the development of a new weapon, something invisible to the human eye and absolutely silent. After finding out about the chlorine gas, Clara shoots herself in the family garden.

            Marie and Pierre Curie: Pierre makes several marriage proposals to Marie before she accepts. A commonality then between these women. On her wedding day, she wears a dark blue dress. More practical, she thinks, and afterward, in her dress, goes back to the laboratory with Pierre. The lab is the basement of their home. In three years, they discover polonium and radium. In eight, they are awarded a Nobel. At first the committee will not recognize her (no woman has won before) but Pierre demands it—she is the one who sifted through ten tons of mineral-rich ore to find that tenth of a gram.

And she then imagines that she sees the flock today because today she is feeling forlorn and abandoned, like a small girl, and doubting and the birds are on a long journey, the journey perhaps of their southern flight for the winter and she also would like to travel, would like some kind of flight, would like an outside of her ideas, the labyrinth of codes and conduct which keeps her close, inside of a closed circuit, and it is only her lover, this carpenter in a Californian city, who had undone the right bands, who has leaked her soul out onto air again, like the small pockets of air beneath the bird-grey wings and lifting them, today, outside of the girl’s window and into the sky.

In his office in the attic, in his favorite khaki pants,

the Archivist carefully sets down the glass case

of his body so as not to rattle the exhibit of his mind.

He wears gloves to stroke the name on the envelope,

the name written in a florid hand trained by long-ago

love. To live among the dead, the Archivist thinks.

His eyebrows do a little jig. With fingers strange

to his wife, the Archivist traces the name of the street

in the village that burned. The street wears the name of the flower

the Archivist’s mother tucked behind her ear in a photograph

languishing in a desk drawer. The Archivist carries his mind

into each house. Here, the Cook makes love, his hand

brushing flour against his boyfriend’s nipple. There,

the Tailor’s satisfied song of scissors bisecting

a ream of red. A girl whose mouth makes an O,

around which chocolate makes another mouth, runs

through the road. The road which runs through

the Archivist’s blood. The girl is the Archivist’s grandmother

only in that she is a story the Archivist tells

himself about how he got here. Under an oak tree,

two dogs fucking. The girl’s ice cream is melting.

The Archivist’s mind is sticky with history.

Of course, the village burns again. History is

the only road that survives. Downstairs, the Archivist’s daughter

is hungry. He restores the dead to their folders. To live!

The girls’ wails rise through the house like smoke.

In the seventeenth century, his Holiness the Pope adjudged beavers to be fish. In retrospect, that was a zoologically illogical decision; but beavers were not miffed at being changed into fish. They decided not to truckle their new specification, not to be perfect fish, textbook fish; instead they became fanciful fish, the first to have furry babies, the first to breathe air and the first fish to build for themselves commodious conical fortresses in the water.

To remain     ::        is to grieve
                        ::        is to answer
                        ::        what side of the río
                                  we crown
                        ::        or
                        ::        where your ancestors
                                  Coffin
 

I decided the caterpillar was too stupid to live. I put it into the carabid beetle’s container. The caterpillar was much larger, but it had no means of defense. The carabid sliced into it and lapped at its leaking blood. Because the caterpillar was so big, the carabid had to repeat his attack eight or ten times. The caterpillar crawled away frantically for the first few wounds, but it was so slow that its movements hardly inconvenienced the beetle drinking from its bleeding flank. After ten minutes or so the caterpillar lay still. Its jade flesh turned black as the beetle chewed and drained it.