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.
Like most of the fight world’s habits, hand wrapping is both practical and ritual. Done properly, it protects the hands from damage without giving a fighter an unfair advantage. Like boxing gloves or a football helmet, wrapping functions as both armor and sword, a protective measure that allows you to hit harder and more frequently than you could without it. One of the officials murmured, “That’s beautiful.” Colonna said “Thank you” without looking up from his work.
Turn signals blink through ice in the skin.
Snake dreams uncoil,
burrow into the spine of books.
Night spills from cracked eggs.
Thin hands vein oars in a canyon bed.
We follow deer tracks back to the insertion of her tongue.
OGUN SIZE:
So she tells Oya she pregnant with Shango’s baby. Just walked up to Oya with them hips you know and was like my name Shun, I got his baby so you ain’t shit to him. And see Oya can’t have no kids. Everybody know that. Now she scared she gone lose Shango. Which would be good if she left the nigga… But she can’t see that, nah she got to show him how much she willing to do for Shango. How far she willing to go for Shango. So she can’t give him no child, she cut off her ear.
OSHOOSI SIZE:
What!
OGUN SIZE:
Put it in a bowl and walked it to him while he was watching TV at her house. She ain’ scream or nothing… Cut off her ear and gave it to him. Say, I don’t want nobody but you. Say this mark me as yours…
The Banker trails behind me with his abacus
and crowd of yes-men. I hear
the gold coins rub together in his vest.
The stoplights remind me. And the scars
on my ankles and the nails in my mouth.
Once my father pointed his finger at me.
Once my mother kissed me on the lips in winter.
I could have been a man like those men
on the roof, eyes narrowed at me
like diamond cutters. In surgical gowns
and crucifix tie clips, tight bands of wires
wound beneath their chests –
they remind me of me. All in sync
they cup their ears to the antenna.
Quiet. The Jew Levine is coming to collect
with his chisels and his sack of flesh.
He watched the sky and thought of all the fires the world had ever seen, fires from wars, fires from bombs. So much smoke. Where has it all gone? New smoke curled beneath wisps of old, drifting ever higher, higher. Where does it all go? He inhaled deeply and his insides burned, and Vernon knew all that smoke was now just the air we breathe.
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
Like most of the fight world’s habits, hand wrapping is both practical and ritual. Done properly, it protects the hands from damage without giving a fighter an unfair advantage. Like boxing gloves or a football helmet, wrapping functions as both armor and sword, a protective measure that allows you to hit harder and more frequently than you could without it. One of the officials murmured, “That’s beautiful.” Colonna said “Thank you” without looking up from his work.
Turn signals blink through ice in the skin.
Snake dreams uncoil,
burrow into the spine of books.
Night spills from cracked eggs.
Thin hands vein oars in a canyon bed.
We follow deer tracks back to the insertion of her tongue.
OGUN SIZE:
So she tells Oya she pregnant with Shango’s baby. Just walked up to Oya with them hips you know and was like my name Shun, I got his baby so you ain’t shit to him. And see Oya can’t have no kids. Everybody know that. Now she scared she gone lose Shango. Which would be good if she left the nigga… But she can’t see that, nah she got to show him how much she willing to do for Shango. How far she willing to go for Shango. So she can’t give him no child, she cut off her ear.
OSHOOSI SIZE:
What!
OGUN SIZE:
Put it in a bowl and walked it to him while he was watching TV at her house. She ain’ scream or nothing… Cut off her ear and gave it to him. Say, I don’t want nobody but you. Say this mark me as yours…
The Banker trails behind me with his abacus
and crowd of yes-men. I hear
the gold coins rub together in his vest.
The stoplights remind me. And the scars
on my ankles and the nails in my mouth.
Once my father pointed his finger at me.
Once my mother kissed me on the lips in winter.
I could have been a man like those men
on the roof, eyes narrowed at me
like diamond cutters. In surgical gowns
and crucifix tie clips, tight bands of wires
wound beneath their chests –
they remind me of me. All in sync
they cup their ears to the antenna.
Quiet. The Jew Levine is coming to collect
with his chisels and his sack of flesh.
He watched the sky and thought of all the fires the world had ever seen, fires from wars, fires from bombs. So much smoke. Where has it all gone? New smoke curled beneath wisps of old, drifting ever higher, higher. Where does it all go? He inhaled deeply and his insides burned, and Vernon knew all that smoke was now just the air we breathe.
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