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.
HOME IS WHERE
I peek from the slit
between my forearms.
Them. They come.
Eyes in all the heads glow.
The flow
melts my arm flesh
Burgundy vessels drip
from bone.
The graveyard this time of year is nice. Damp orange yellow red leaves pile at the headstones for pillows. Place my head in leaves. Soil moist and black like chocolate cake and taste like worms. Arms spread legs spread wind crawls up my pants leg to pocket soft backs of knees. Slightly arched back anchors shoulders to my throat, jaw, head. Eyes fixed to the blue grey. Meanwhile. An old deer limps over, sits like a dog, licks my shoes.
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.
Rising at four, the students bow to the Buddha one hundred and eight times, and sit meditation for an hour before breakfast, heads rolling into sleep and jerking awake. At the end of the working period the sun rises, a clear, distant light over Su Dok Mountain; they put aside brooms and wheelbarrows and return to the meditation hall. When it sets, at four in the afternoon, it seems only a few hours have passed. An apprentice monk climbs the drum tower and beats a steady rhythm as he falls into shadow.
In that darkness,
Speakers rose like
Housing projects,
Moonlight diamonded
Mesh-wire panes.
What was it that bloomed
Around his curled
Body when the lights
Came up, fluorescent,
Vacant, garish?
The gym throbbed
With beats & rage
And his eyes darted
Like a man nailed
To a burning crucifix.
A far cry. Epistrophy. A refusal.
A nightingale is recorded in a field
where finally we meet to touch and sleep.
A nightingale attests
as bombers buzz and whir
overhead enroute to raid.
We meet undercover of brush and dust.
We meet to revise what we heard.
The year I can’t tell you. The past restages
the future. Palindrome we can’t resolve.
But the coded trill a fever ascending,
a Markov chain, discrete equation,
generative pulse, sweet arrest,
bronchial junction, harmonic jam.
Shortly after Halloween, Ruthie Wittenberg, round-faced, black bangs clasped at her temples by blue plastic My Merry barrettes I coveted, the only girl in the class shorter than I, befriended me. From Ruthie I learned many things: how to fold the Land O’Lakes butter box so the Indian girl’s knees turned into boobies (Ruthie’s word; I didn’t admit to mine), the naughty version of the Bosco song. I learned why there were no Polish people in our school or in our neighborhood, though Milwaukee was full of them. They had to live, Ruthie told me, south of the Kinnickkinnick River, in basements. “Because they never wash,” Ruthie explained. They used their bathtubs for storing coal. They farted all the time from the odd food they ate: dogs, Ruthie said, among other things. I nodded. Back in Oklahoma we had Indians, pretty much the same. When I asked how you could tell if somebody was Polish, Ruthie said, “You’ll know it when you smell one.”
HOME IS WHERE
I peek from the slit
between my forearms.
Them. They come.
Eyes in all the heads glow.
The flow
melts my arm flesh
Burgundy vessels drip
from bone.
The graveyard this time of year is nice. Damp orange yellow red leaves pile at the headstones for pillows. Place my head in leaves. Soil moist and black like chocolate cake and taste like worms. Arms spread legs spread wind crawls up my pants leg to pocket soft backs of knees. Slightly arched back anchors shoulders to my throat, jaw, head. Eyes fixed to the blue grey. Meanwhile. An old deer limps over, sits like a dog, licks my shoes.
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.
Rising at four, the students bow to the Buddha one hundred and eight times, and sit meditation for an hour before breakfast, heads rolling into sleep and jerking awake. At the end of the working period the sun rises, a clear, distant light over Su Dok Mountain; they put aside brooms and wheelbarrows and return to the meditation hall. When it sets, at four in the afternoon, it seems only a few hours have passed. An apprentice monk climbs the drum tower and beats a steady rhythm as he falls into shadow.
In that darkness,
Speakers rose like
Housing projects,
Moonlight diamonded
Mesh-wire panes.
What was it that bloomed
Around his curled
Body when the lights
Came up, fluorescent,
Vacant, garish?
The gym throbbed
With beats & rage
And his eyes darted
Like a man nailed
To a burning crucifix.
A far cry. Epistrophy. A refusal.
A nightingale is recorded in a field
where finally we meet to touch and sleep.
A nightingale attests
as bombers buzz and whir
overhead enroute to raid.
We meet undercover of brush and dust.
We meet to revise what we heard.
The year I can’t tell you. The past restages
the future. Palindrome we can’t resolve.
But the coded trill a fever ascending,
a Markov chain, discrete equation,
generative pulse, sweet arrest,
bronchial junction, harmonic jam.
Shortly after Halloween, Ruthie Wittenberg, round-faced, black bangs clasped at her temples by blue plastic My Merry barrettes I coveted, the only girl in the class shorter than I, befriended me. From Ruthie I learned many things: how to fold the Land O’Lakes butter box so the Indian girl’s knees turned into boobies (Ruthie’s word; I didn’t admit to mine), the naughty version of the Bosco song. I learned why there were no Polish people in our school or in our neighborhood, though Milwaukee was full of them. They had to live, Ruthie told me, south of the Kinnickkinnick River, in basements. “Because they never wash,” Ruthie explained. They used their bathtubs for storing coal. They farted all the time from the odd food they ate: dogs, Ruthie said, among other things. I nodded. Back in Oklahoma we had Indians, pretty much the same. When I asked how you could tell if somebody was Polish, Ruthie said, “You’ll know it when you smell one.”