Whiting Award Winners

no one wants to admit it but you just

might end up one day in the wrong

place at the wrong time and some

evil shit rains down on you

and maybe you get

crippled or blind

or plain old

dead and

not one soul will give a good goddamn

because they can soothe them-

selves with a wrung out prayer

about wrong places and

wrong times, when

even as they’re

thinking that

they know

that everywhere is the wrong place

and every hour is the wrong hour

and that bad breaks don’t seek

you out; they’re always there

waiting to swing into action

like a traitor limb you

didn’t even know

you had

I have a garden in my brain

shaped like a maze

I lose myself

in, it seems. They only look for me

sometimes. I don’t like my dreams.

The nurses quarrel over where I am

hiding. I hear from inside

a bush. One is crisp

and cuts; one pinches. I’d like to push

them each somewhere.

They both think it’s funny

here. The laughter sounds like diesels.

I won’t come out because I’m lazy.

You start to like the needles.

You start to want to crazy.

My mother supports an agency that every week or so sends her a list of the world’s political prisoners who are known to be in immediate danger of their lives. She sits over a chunky Adler typewriter and composes polite pleas to jailors and torturers and killers on behalf of their victims. “In the name of liberty, of decency, Your Excellency…”

These petitions for pity and reason, strangled as they are by formality, necessarily without anger, she types on personal stationery of pale yellow or pale tangerine or aqua—the kind got at a pharmacy. Her bursitis makes the typing difficult, and the text is unevenly imprinted, since some of the keys have more bite than others, the way she works them. All the same, her handwriting is impossible.

As Isamina Belle confided later, when she stepped in her front door and saw her husband hanging from a rope tied to a joist, with his head bowed as if in prayer and his feet dangling inches from the floor, the first thing she did was to hasten and fling open all the windows in the house.

…nothing changed with Nadia. She didn’t get better, she didn’t get worse, her fever never went below a hundred and one. I visited her before and after work all week. Her IV bag emptied and was replaced; the back of her hand around the needle was bruised dark as an Oreo. She would wake up occasionally and say hello, her voice hoarse, her palate swollen and red when I peered in, and I would say hello back, touch her face. Ted came after school and read aloud from his book, sitting with his legs crossed, his big dark head bent over the pages. Every day he bought a single orange soda in a paper cup for sixty-five cents. Nurses came in red fur hats, sang “Jingle Bells” and “O Christmas Tress.” The rash traveled down her neck and back, across her stomach, drifting, and I imagined something about the size of my palm moving under her skin, some unformed thing lost, looking for a place to fasten itself.

Able God walked in slowly, dazed, then he stepped outside and turned to look at his neighbors, who were sitting in the narrow alley. He scanned their faces for answers, but they turned away, shifted on their low stools, and one after another, went into their rooms.

Inside, Able God paced the house, frustration coiling around his head. Had he had any doubt that the police were aware of his involvement, what he saw erased it. He looked out through the louvered window. He blundered his way manically through the chaos, tossing things aside. He pulled up the mattress, rifled through his clothes, heaped one on the other.

He noticed they had not taken his hidden wrap of marijuana, but his chess pieces were spilled all over the ground. He tried to gather them into a plastic bag, but his whole body trembled now, his eyes smarting with tears. The chess set was not meant to be scattered; the pieces were meant to be neatly arranged. How had the police known where he lived? Maybe Akudo had been arrested, but if so, why was the madam protecting her whereabouts?