Whiting Award Winners

Six monarch butterfly cocoons

            Clinging to the back of your throat –

            you could feel their gold wings trembling.

You were alarmed. You felt infested.

In the downstairs bathroom of the family home,

            gagging to spit them out –

                        and a voice saying, Don’t, don’t –

Outside, my grandfather wheeling

a pesticide tank

from tree to tree, spraying everything

with thick, white foam –

bark, leaf, apple flesh –

salting the garden

with handfuls of red sand, dissolving

aphid, Japanese beetle, horned tomato worm

as thick as rope. Gone

in an instant, emerging

from his fiberglass outbuilding shed, helving

an axe, bright blade, pine handle,

to eliminate

a dwarf peach weakened by nesting beetles.

O ordinary axe

We do not mean to complain. We know how it is.

In older, even sadder cultures the worst possible sorts

have been playing hot and cold with people’s lives

for much longer. Like Perrow says,

We’ll all have baboon hearts one of these days.

We wintered with ample fuel and real tomatoes.

We were allowed to roam, sniffing and chewing

at the tufted crust. We were let to breathe.

That is, we respirated. Now the soft clocks

have gorged themselves on our time. Yet

as our hair blanches and comes out

in hanks, we can tell it is nearly spring –

the students shed their black coats

on the green; we begin to see shade.

Lo, this is the breastbone’s embraceable light.

We are here. Still breathing and constellated.

It’s May and I’ve just awakened from a nap, curled against sagebrush the way my dog taught me to sleep—sheltered from wind. A front is pulling the huge sky over me, and from the dark a hailstone has hit me on the head. I’m trailing a band of two thousand sheep across a stretch of Wyoming badlands, a fifty-mile trip that takes five days because sheep shade up in hot sun and won’t budge until it’s cool.  Bunched together now, and excited into a run by the storm, they drift across dry land, tumbling into draws like water and surge out again onto the rugged, choppy plateaus that are the building blocks of this state.

I’ll make you a saint

from an unblemished code book

that must be read

in a German restaurant

where beer is served in glasses

wrapped in brown leather

when the cuckoo strikes twelve

this will be the moment

of ascension

so mama said no running, afraid
for me: shriveled lansones, sickly.

threat of skinned shins. cherry
glow of lola’s clove cigarettes,

smoke plumes sealing my throat.
or on my cheeks, plum rashes

blooming from playing in witchwillow.
these days, I don’t run much.

but I was only seven when I broke
a girl’s front teeth.