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.
We Googled how to shoot gun, and when we tried, we were spooked by the recoil, by the salty smell and smoke, by the liturgical drama of the whole thing in the woods. But actually we loved to shoot them, the guns. We liked to shoot them wrong even, with a loose hand, the pitch forward and the pitch back. Under our judicious trigger fingers, beer bottles died, Vogue magazines died, Chia Pets died, oak saplings died, squirrels died, elk died. We feasted.
I remembered the sweet powerful taste of pop. Tommy Feathers had stopped for coffee when he was hunting wolverine. He tossed a bulged red and white can on the chopping block. “You’ll have tat one springtime,” he joked. He was sober; that meant he was laughing and friendly, not frothing about naluagmius starving his family, stealing food out of his children’s mouths. We had sat around waiting for it to thaw. We could have bought pops in Takunak but according to Abe, pop cost money, wasted aluminum, and was bad for our teeth. Nothing for something. Why not drink water? Now Iris was describing the high school friends and fun we’d always worried we missed out on, and I wondered why I hadn’t bought myself a few Cokes.
When in 1679 a London woman swung at Tyburn for bestiality, her canine partner in crime suffered the same punishment on the same grounds. King James I ordered a bear that had killed a child to be baited to death, and rural shepherds frequently hanged dogs caught worrying their flocks. The Merchant of Venice included a reference to “a wolf, hanged for human slaughter” sufficiently cursory to suggest that Shakespeare’s audience recognized animals as appropriate participants in formal judicial proceedings.
To be inside a body that’s going to go
is not so bad. A train rushes out of a station
and by the time it’s gone around the bend
that town is a tiny abandoned World of Tomorrow.
Passengers looking out of the train
see the windows of warehouses are the slow in a penny arcade
and they tell time by the clock face of every house.
Steel springs coil inside the trees.
Then the train will pull them down the tracks
they can’t invent fast enough for their need to survive.
WINN – How’s Melba?
EM – She told me she could see the afterlife.
WINN – What’s it like?
EM – Or my afterlife. She said that I would be a few other things when I die, that my cells have tiny souls so when I am a piece of cheese and a pigeon, I will still be me, but my consciousness will be broken down into smaller bits.
WINN – Does that feel happy to you?
EM – I don’t care. I’ll be like a deconstructed sandwich. / Or baby.
DOU YI
My hands were packed in dry ice
Flown across the Pacific and
Stitched onto a man who lost his overseas.
My palms open doors to
Rooms my feet haven't walked through and
Caress a woman my eyes will never see.
It doesn't snow there but my
Nails ache when they touch ice and
Scratch strange characters onto that
Soldier's skin while he's sleeping.
His doctors call it post-traumatic stress but
He knows they're words from a
Language his tongue never learned
Justice.
Justice.
Justice
Across the East Sea a yam farmer
Uses my corneas to see.
She dreams of snow but thinks
It's ashes from a childhood fire bombing.
On the far side of the Atlantic my stomach digests
Food that never passed through my lips
Food my teeth didn't chew
Food my tongue hasn't tasted
Food that could have made this spirit stronger
And act sooner if someone offered it to Dou Yi.
But my heart--
My heart beats in this town,
Pumping blood through a man
Loved by the son of an official,
A son who moved Heaven and Earth for
His Happiness.
His Future.
His New Harmony.
These offerings have given me strength
I feel my spirit reviving!
Justice.
Justice.
Justice.
Justice and burial for the widow Dou Yi
Justice.
Justice.
Justice.
But how can you bury a woman whose butchered body's still living?
Justice.
Justice.
That is my heart. It should beat inside me.
(Dou Yi thrusts her hand into Rocket's chest and retrieves her heart.)
We Googled how to shoot gun, and when we tried, we were spooked by the recoil, by the salty smell and smoke, by the liturgical drama of the whole thing in the woods. But actually we loved to shoot them, the guns. We liked to shoot them wrong even, with a loose hand, the pitch forward and the pitch back. Under our judicious trigger fingers, beer bottles died, Vogue magazines died, Chia Pets died, oak saplings died, squirrels died, elk died. We feasted.
I remembered the sweet powerful taste of pop. Tommy Feathers had stopped for coffee when he was hunting wolverine. He tossed a bulged red and white can on the chopping block. “You’ll have tat one springtime,” he joked. He was sober; that meant he was laughing and friendly, not frothing about naluagmius starving his family, stealing food out of his children’s mouths. We had sat around waiting for it to thaw. We could have bought pops in Takunak but according to Abe, pop cost money, wasted aluminum, and was bad for our teeth. Nothing for something. Why not drink water? Now Iris was describing the high school friends and fun we’d always worried we missed out on, and I wondered why I hadn’t bought myself a few Cokes.
When in 1679 a London woman swung at Tyburn for bestiality, her canine partner in crime suffered the same punishment on the same grounds. King James I ordered a bear that had killed a child to be baited to death, and rural shepherds frequently hanged dogs caught worrying their flocks. The Merchant of Venice included a reference to “a wolf, hanged for human slaughter” sufficiently cursory to suggest that Shakespeare’s audience recognized animals as appropriate participants in formal judicial proceedings.
To be inside a body that’s going to go
is not so bad. A train rushes out of a station
and by the time it’s gone around the bend
that town is a tiny abandoned World of Tomorrow.
Passengers looking out of the train
see the windows of warehouses are the slow in a penny arcade
and they tell time by the clock face of every house.
Steel springs coil inside the trees.
Then the train will pull them down the tracks
they can’t invent fast enough for their need to survive.
WINN – How’s Melba?
EM – She told me she could see the afterlife.
WINN – What’s it like?
EM – Or my afterlife. She said that I would be a few other things when I die, that my cells have tiny souls so when I am a piece of cheese and a pigeon, I will still be me, but my consciousness will be broken down into smaller bits.
WINN – Does that feel happy to you?
EM – I don’t care. I’ll be like a deconstructed sandwich. / Or baby.
DOU YI
My hands were packed in dry ice
Flown across the Pacific and
Stitched onto a man who lost his overseas.
My palms open doors to
Rooms my feet haven't walked through and
Caress a woman my eyes will never see.
It doesn't snow there but my
Nails ache when they touch ice and
Scratch strange characters onto that
Soldier's skin while he's sleeping.
His doctors call it post-traumatic stress but
He knows they're words from a
Language his tongue never learned
Justice.
Justice.
Justice
Across the East Sea a yam farmer
Uses my corneas to see.
She dreams of snow but thinks
It's ashes from a childhood fire bombing.
On the far side of the Atlantic my stomach digests
Food that never passed through my lips
Food my teeth didn't chew
Food my tongue hasn't tasted
Food that could have made this spirit stronger
And act sooner if someone offered it to Dou Yi.
But my heart--
My heart beats in this town,
Pumping blood through a man
Loved by the son of an official,
A son who moved Heaven and Earth for
His Happiness.
His Future.
His New Harmony.
These offerings have given me strength
I feel my spirit reviving!
Justice.
Justice.
Justice.
Justice and burial for the widow Dou Yi
Justice.
Justice.
Justice.
But how can you bury a woman whose butchered body's still living?
Justice.
Justice.
That is my heart. It should beat inside me.
(Dou Yi thrusts her hand into Rocket's chest and retrieves her heart.)