Whiting Award Winners

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. 

The deaf hear only in their dreams. I am sure

I can hear nothing. My how the mountain leaps

towards the sea and the little village below.

Who sang for the white plate my father tossed

at my sister’s shadow? What funeral is held

for a broken compass? When cutting onions,

leave a candle lit somewhere near an old man

holding his wife in a napkin. In the torn light of evening,

there is enough treason for everybody. Excuse me,

I should say something about the beauty of cranes.

Once in a sycamore I tossed a brick at a boy’s head.

It opened like the sea. I think I saw a crane.

“Now, because it’s his birthday and he wasn’t supposed to make it this far, he asked that we throw him a bash, like the old Augusta blowouts, and he asked that at midnight we shoot him dead.”

I stared at him. He didn’t waver.

“We figure you’re the best guy to do it,” he said, slapping a hand on my shoulder.

“I’ve never even shot a gun,” I said.

He pulled up my shirt and took the gun from the back of my pants. “It’s pretty basic. Point and pull. You’ve seen the movies.” He aimed the pistol at the portrait of the old man, said “Bang” and faked the recoil, then blew imaginary smoke from the barrel.

Javier was crazy about tacos. He loved them the way some men love their women: a nice, hard, firm shell. While many men have fallen to the wayside on account of a woman, it is hard to imagine a taco unraveling a man the way it did Javier. After simple surgery to remove a cyst from his gallbladder, one of Javier’s friends snuck him a couple of hard-shelled tacos. He propped himself up in his bed, the green of his hospital pajamas matching the lettuce in his taco, smiled wide, and dug in. After a good meal, he thanked the Lord for his many blessings, including such good friends, then laid himself down to sleep never to wake again. The taco shell had ripped his stitches as it went down.

…nothing changed with Nadia. She didn’t get better, she didn’t get worse, her fever never went below a hundred and one. I visited her before and after work all week. Her IV bag emptied and was replaced; the back of her hand around the needle was bruised dark as an Oreo. She would wake up occasionally and say hello, her voice hoarse, her palate swollen and red when I peered in, and I would say hello back, touch her face. Ted came after school and read aloud from his book, sitting with his legs crossed, his big dark head bent over the pages. Every day he bought a single orange soda in a paper cup for sixty-five cents. Nurses came in red fur hats, sang “Jingle Bells” and “O Christmas Tress.” The rash traveled down her neck and back, across her stomach, drifting, and I imagined something about the size of my palm moving under her skin, some unformed thing lost, looking for a place to fasten itself.

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 –