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.
Masters, never trust me. Listen: each day
is a Negro boy, chained, slogging out of the waves,
panting, gripping the sum of his captain, the head,
ripped off, the blood purpling down, the red
hair flossed between the knuckles, swinging it
before him like judgment, saying to the mist,
then not, then quietly only to himself, This is what
I’ll do to you, what you dream I do, sir, if you like it.
What could put an end to the worst of the internet? Social and economic collapse would do it, or perhaps a series of antitrust cases followed by a package of hard regulatory legislation that would somehow also dismantle the internet’s fundamental profit model. At this point it’s clear that collapse will almost definitely come first. Barring that, we’ve got nothing except our small attempts to retain our humanity.
The dog is God.
It knows it is God.
It is God living with God.
Even in the rain,
the esters, the pheromones,
calligraphy of the sacred,
the great head points into the wind,
the blood thrashes in the thick veins.
The language of the feces, urine,
species, rut, offal, decay –
nothing is hidden from the dog,
who keeps its own counsel,
leading you by the leash.
In his office in the attic, in his favorite khaki pants,
the Archivist carefully sets down the glass case
of his body so as not to rattle the exhibit of his mind.
He wears gloves to stroke the name on the envelope,
the name written in a florid hand trained by long-ago
love. To live among the dead, the Archivist thinks.
His eyebrows do a little jig. With fingers strange
to his wife, the Archivist traces the name of the street
in the village that burned. The street wears the name of the flower
the Archivist’s mother tucked behind her ear in a photograph
languishing in a desk drawer. The Archivist carries his mind
into each house. Here, the Cook makes love, his hand
brushing flour against his boyfriend’s nipple. There,
the Tailor’s satisfied song of scissors bisecting
a ream of red. A girl whose mouth makes an O,
around which chocolate makes another mouth, runs
through the road. The road which runs through
the Archivist’s blood. The girl is the Archivist’s grandmother
only in that she is a story the Archivist tells
himself about how he got here. Under an oak tree,
two dogs fucking. The girl’s ice cream is melting.
The Archivist’s mind is sticky with history.
Of course, the village burns again. History is
the only road that survives. Downstairs, the Archivist’s daughter
is hungry. He restores the dead to their folders. To live!
The girls’ wails rise through the house like smoke.
The hotel staff placed a pitcher of water on each table next to a small stack of translucent cups. I couldn’t help but shake my head at that. We would have been better off, I figured, taking Imam Saleem’s suggestion and just staying put at the Temple. The kitchen sisters would have at least given us some fruit punch and sugar cookies. Hell, had we asked nice enough, they might have made us some fried chicken and potato salad. If we were trying to throw money around like Rockefellers, why not put it in the building fund or pay zakat? But I was a one-man HVAC operation, with little more than a truck, some tools, and a house I was just three mortgage payments away from owning outright. As far as those brothers were concerned, I was too ordinary, based on outward appearances, to be an example.
The ensuing inquiries found the girl to be a teenager, though she weighed only fifty-nine pounds and was only fifty-four inches tall. She was in much worse physical shape than at first suspected: she was incontinent, could not chew solid food and could hardly swallow, could not focus her eyes beyond twelve feet, and, according to some accounts, could not cry. She salivated constantly, spat indiscriminately. She had a ring of hard callus around her buttocks, and she had two nearly complete sets of teeth. Her hair was thin. She could not hop, skip, climb, or do anything requiring the full extension of her limbs. She showed no perception of hot or cold.
Masters, never trust me. Listen: each day
is a Negro boy, chained, slogging out of the waves,
panting, gripping the sum of his captain, the head,
ripped off, the blood purpling down, the red
hair flossed between the knuckles, swinging it
before him like judgment, saying to the mist,
then not, then quietly only to himself, This is what
I’ll do to you, what you dream I do, sir, if you like it.
What could put an end to the worst of the internet? Social and economic collapse would do it, or perhaps a series of antitrust cases followed by a package of hard regulatory legislation that would somehow also dismantle the internet’s fundamental profit model. At this point it’s clear that collapse will almost definitely come first. Barring that, we’ve got nothing except our small attempts to retain our humanity.
The dog is God.
It knows it is God.
It is God living with God.
Even in the rain,
the esters, the pheromones,
calligraphy of the sacred,
the great head points into the wind,
the blood thrashes in the thick veins.
The language of the feces, urine,
species, rut, offal, decay –
nothing is hidden from the dog,
who keeps its own counsel,
leading you by the leash.
In his office in the attic, in his favorite khaki pants,
the Archivist carefully sets down the glass case
of his body so as not to rattle the exhibit of his mind.
He wears gloves to stroke the name on the envelope,
the name written in a florid hand trained by long-ago
love. To live among the dead, the Archivist thinks.
His eyebrows do a little jig. With fingers strange
to his wife, the Archivist traces the name of the street
in the village that burned. The street wears the name of the flower
the Archivist’s mother tucked behind her ear in a photograph
languishing in a desk drawer. The Archivist carries his mind
into each house. Here, the Cook makes love, his hand
brushing flour against his boyfriend’s nipple. There,
the Tailor’s satisfied song of scissors bisecting
a ream of red. A girl whose mouth makes an O,
around which chocolate makes another mouth, runs
through the road. The road which runs through
the Archivist’s blood. The girl is the Archivist’s grandmother
only in that she is a story the Archivist tells
himself about how he got here. Under an oak tree,
two dogs fucking. The girl’s ice cream is melting.
The Archivist’s mind is sticky with history.
Of course, the village burns again. History is
the only road that survives. Downstairs, the Archivist’s daughter
is hungry. He restores the dead to their folders. To live!
The girls’ wails rise through the house like smoke.
The hotel staff placed a pitcher of water on each table next to a small stack of translucent cups. I couldn’t help but shake my head at that. We would have been better off, I figured, taking Imam Saleem’s suggestion and just staying put at the Temple. The kitchen sisters would have at least given us some fruit punch and sugar cookies. Hell, had we asked nice enough, they might have made us some fried chicken and potato salad. If we were trying to throw money around like Rockefellers, why not put it in the building fund or pay zakat? But I was a one-man HVAC operation, with little more than a truck, some tools, and a house I was just three mortgage payments away from owning outright. As far as those brothers were concerned, I was too ordinary, based on outward appearances, to be an example.
The ensuing inquiries found the girl to be a teenager, though she weighed only fifty-nine pounds and was only fifty-four inches tall. She was in much worse physical shape than at first suspected: she was incontinent, could not chew solid food and could hardly swallow, could not focus her eyes beyond twelve feet, and, according to some accounts, could not cry. She salivated constantly, spat indiscriminately. She had a ring of hard callus around her buttocks, and she had two nearly complete sets of teeth. Her hair was thin. She could not hop, skip, climb, or do anything requiring the full extension of her limbs. She showed no perception of hot or cold.