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.
I’m good enough to get the once-over in the bar at The Restaurant, I see them thinking my
smallness is appealing, my ass and face are cute enough, I see them thinking that short haircut
might be sexy. I’m always in a backless cocktail dress and heels, I’m flat chested and a tad
muscular so they ask me if I’m a dancer and say Call me sometime, let’s have a drink. It took
me a while to understand you’re supposed to work that for your money but you can let the
willingness fall right off your face when you turn around. It took me a while to understand that of
course men fling their entreaties out in swarms, like schools of sperm, hoping one will stick.
I imagine my daddy’s mind
looks most like broken
dryer machines
scattered in a forest,
field mice living
in the leftover lint.
I imagine it looks
like stepped-on
syringes, too,
flies stooping
down to sop up
all the sweet.
Girlie was, by every conceivable metric, one
of the very best. All the chaff, long ago
burned up by unquenchable fire: the ones who
had hourly panic attacks, the ones who took
up drinking; the ones who fucked in the
stairwells during break time, the ones who
started bringing handguns to the office, the
ones who started believing the Holocaust had
never happened, or that 9/11 was an inside
job, or that no one had ever been to the
moon at all, or that every presidential
candidate was picked by a cosmic society of
devils who communicated across
interplanetary channels; the ones who took
the work home, the ones who never came back
the same, or never came back at all. The
floor was now averaging only three or four
suicide attempts a year, down from one or
two a month. The ones who remained, like
her, were the wheat: the exemplars, tested
paladins, the ones who didn’t throw up in
the hallway and leave the vomit there.
They’d been, to continue speaking of it
biblically, separated.
From MODERATION by Elaine Castillo, published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.
Whitman kept all the sleepers to himself but one, & she wasn’t just a demon
in the sack. When she wasn’t sleeping by daylight, she was the demon
slinging a house shoe at her children over the front seat of the Plymouth
while simultaneously steering it between the orgasmic, careening semis &
Beetle Bug Blue, Piddiddle, Beetle Bug Black.
And the sky!
Nooned with the steadfast blue enthusiasm
Of an empty nursery.
Crooked lizards grassed in yellow shade.
The grass was lizarding,
Green and on a rampage.
Shade tenacious in the crook of a bent stem.
Noon. This noon –
Skyed, blue and full of hum, full of bloom.
The grass was lizarding
Once, when I was a very little girl in a bubble bath, I asked my father why I had a belly button. He was sitting on the toilet lid reading while I splashed. He peered at me over the top of his book.
“So you know where your center is,” he said.
“Why do I need to know where my center is?” I asked.
“So you don’t lose your balance,” he said. “Your center is where all the different parts of who you are come together. It used to connect you to your mother and to the beginning of human history in Africa.” I cannot be certain this is true, but when I remember him saying this, I hear his voice catch on the word mother.
I’m good enough to get the once-over in the bar at The Restaurant, I see them thinking my
smallness is appealing, my ass and face are cute enough, I see them thinking that short haircut
might be sexy. I’m always in a backless cocktail dress and heels, I’m flat chested and a tad
muscular so they ask me if I’m a dancer and say Call me sometime, let’s have a drink. It took
me a while to understand you’re supposed to work that for your money but you can let the
willingness fall right off your face when you turn around. It took me a while to understand that of
course men fling their entreaties out in swarms, like schools of sperm, hoping one will stick.
I imagine my daddy’s mind
looks most like broken
dryer machines
scattered in a forest,
field mice living
in the leftover lint.
I imagine it looks
like stepped-on
syringes, too,
flies stooping
down to sop up
all the sweet.
Girlie was, by every conceivable metric, one
of the very best. All the chaff, long ago
burned up by unquenchable fire: the ones who
had hourly panic attacks, the ones who took
up drinking; the ones who fucked in the
stairwells during break time, the ones who
started bringing handguns to the office, the
ones who started believing the Holocaust had
never happened, or that 9/11 was an inside
job, or that no one had ever been to the
moon at all, or that every presidential
candidate was picked by a cosmic society of
devils who communicated across
interplanetary channels; the ones who took
the work home, the ones who never came back
the same, or never came back at all. The
floor was now averaging only three or four
suicide attempts a year, down from one or
two a month. The ones who remained, like
her, were the wheat: the exemplars, tested
paladins, the ones who didn’t throw up in
the hallway and leave the vomit there.
They’d been, to continue speaking of it
biblically, separated.
From MODERATION by Elaine Castillo, published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.
Whitman kept all the sleepers to himself but one, & she wasn’t just a demon
in the sack. When she wasn’t sleeping by daylight, she was the demon
slinging a house shoe at her children over the front seat of the Plymouth
while simultaneously steering it between the orgasmic, careening semis &
Beetle Bug Blue, Piddiddle, Beetle Bug Black.
And the sky!
Nooned with the steadfast blue enthusiasm
Of an empty nursery.
Crooked lizards grassed in yellow shade.
The grass was lizarding,
Green and on a rampage.
Shade tenacious in the crook of a bent stem.
Noon. This noon –
Skyed, blue and full of hum, full of bloom.
The grass was lizarding
Once, when I was a very little girl in a bubble bath, I asked my father why I had a belly button. He was sitting on the toilet lid reading while I splashed. He peered at me over the top of his book.
“So you know where your center is,” he said.
“Why do I need to know where my center is?” I asked.
“So you don’t lose your balance,” he said. “Your center is where all the different parts of who you are come together. It used to connect you to your mother and to the beginning of human history in Africa.” I cannot be certain this is true, but when I remember him saying this, I hear his voice catch on the word mother.