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.
Edith Goodnough isn’t in the country anymore. She’s in town now, in the hospital, lying there is that white bed with a needle stuck in the back of one hand and a man standing guard in the hallway outside her room. She will be eighty years old this week: a clean beautiful white-haired woman who never in her life weighed as much as 115 pounds, and she has weighed a lot less than that since New Year’s Eve. Still, the sheriff and the lawyers expect her to get well enough for them to sit her up in a wheelchair and then drive her across town to the courthouse to begin the trial. When that happens, if that happens, I don’t know that they will go so far as to put handcuffs on her. Bus Sealy, the sheriff, has turned out to be a son of a bitch, all right, but I still can’t see him putting handcuffs on a woman like Edith Goodnough.
Kenosha is hideous behind us, cloaked by this cloud that hangs
On the pigeons flushed out: the last exhalation of the auto assembly.
We wait at the base of the docks, and talk about the White Sox,
Not the Roman Empire. My father and I stare right at it, but talk baseball.
In his bath my son looks half-
drowned,
lying so still,
his hair a scarf of weed,
his eyes closed,
and only the water breathing.
He practices
in his porcelain bed
his resting,
rehearsing
until the water takes cold
and he shivers a little against it.
I realize then that Wichu knows. Of course he knows. He was here, at this temple, outside of the pavilion with his mother, when Khamron got drafted years ago. He was here when the wealthier boys got taken out of the line. He was here when those same boys came back an hour later, took their places at the end of the lottery line, and—when their turns came—drew black card after black card after black card. Wichu had told me all about it the night of his brother’s draft. Although I had only half listened to him at the time, the memory of his voice comes back to me now in all its anger.
“Draft Day” from SIGHTSEEING © 2005 by Rattawaut Lapcharoensap; reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Atlantic, Inc.
I’m sure you won’t believe this,
but if a policeman walks behind me, I tremble:
What would Shaft do? What would Shaft do?
Bits of my courage flake away like dandruff.
I’m sweating even as I tell you this.
I’m not cool.
I keep the real me tucked beneath a wig,
I’m a small American frog.
I grow beautiful as the theatre dims.
He did it deliberately &
so when the police tracked him down he was
able to explain it so
clearly they had to
agree. Still, they hadn’t done it.
Anyway, he’d checked it out &
it was what they’d suspected,
women! – women just
opened & spilled, there was
nothing special in there after all.
Edith Goodnough isn’t in the country anymore. She’s in town now, in the hospital, lying there is that white bed with a needle stuck in the back of one hand and a man standing guard in the hallway outside her room. She will be eighty years old this week: a clean beautiful white-haired woman who never in her life weighed as much as 115 pounds, and she has weighed a lot less than that since New Year’s Eve. Still, the sheriff and the lawyers expect her to get well enough for them to sit her up in a wheelchair and then drive her across town to the courthouse to begin the trial. When that happens, if that happens, I don’t know that they will go so far as to put handcuffs on her. Bus Sealy, the sheriff, has turned out to be a son of a bitch, all right, but I still can’t see him putting handcuffs on a woman like Edith Goodnough.
Kenosha is hideous behind us, cloaked by this cloud that hangs
On the pigeons flushed out: the last exhalation of the auto assembly.
We wait at the base of the docks, and talk about the White Sox,
Not the Roman Empire. My father and I stare right at it, but talk baseball.
In his bath my son looks half-
drowned,
lying so still,
his hair a scarf of weed,
his eyes closed,
and only the water breathing.
He practices
in his porcelain bed
his resting,
rehearsing
until the water takes cold
and he shivers a little against it.
I realize then that Wichu knows. Of course he knows. He was here, at this temple, outside of the pavilion with his mother, when Khamron got drafted years ago. He was here when the wealthier boys got taken out of the line. He was here when those same boys came back an hour later, took their places at the end of the lottery line, and—when their turns came—drew black card after black card after black card. Wichu had told me all about it the night of his brother’s draft. Although I had only half listened to him at the time, the memory of his voice comes back to me now in all its anger.
“Draft Day” from SIGHTSEEING © 2005 by Rattawaut Lapcharoensap; reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Atlantic, Inc.
I’m sure you won’t believe this,
but if a policeman walks behind me, I tremble:
What would Shaft do? What would Shaft do?
Bits of my courage flake away like dandruff.
I’m sweating even as I tell you this.
I’m not cool.
I keep the real me tucked beneath a wig,
I’m a small American frog.
I grow beautiful as the theatre dims.
He did it deliberately &
so when the police tracked him down he was
able to explain it so
clearly they had to
agree. Still, they hadn’t done it.
Anyway, he’d checked it out &
it was what they’d suspected,
women! – women just
opened & spilled, there was
nothing special in there after all.