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.
“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.
You leave the space between the houses uncrossed. You rarely go across the street, which is forty feet wide.
You are grateful for the distance. It is as if each house on your block stood on its own enchanted island, fifty feet wide by one hundred feet long.
People come and go from it, your parents mostly and your friends. Your parents arrive like pilgrims.
But the island is remote. You occasionally hear the sounds of anger. You almost never hear the sounds of love.
You hear, always at night, the shifting of the uprights, the sagging of ceiling joists, and the unpredictable ticking of the gas heater.
In these short distances and insufferable spans the boy lives through a night forgotten by history, where the men of the land and soldiers of the shah take to each other with bullet, knife, curse and bludgeon to craft a single composition; the precise choreography of flesh puppets, strung to a thousand stars and pulled as sparring lovers, to and from the flame, to and from the gouge, to and from the stab and shot, their beating hearts like magnets charged to the opposite pulls of victory and death.
We unyoke owl pellets from marrow
in desert meadow. His mouth a pigeon eye,
a torch, a womb turned flower. He, still a boy
dug from cactus skull, undresses into bark
beetles. He unlearns how to hold a gist
with my hand.
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.
“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.
You leave the space between the houses uncrossed. You rarely go across the street, which is forty feet wide.
You are grateful for the distance. It is as if each house on your block stood on its own enchanted island, fifty feet wide by one hundred feet long.
People come and go from it, your parents mostly and your friends. Your parents arrive like pilgrims.
But the island is remote. You occasionally hear the sounds of anger. You almost never hear the sounds of love.
You hear, always at night, the shifting of the uprights, the sagging of ceiling joists, and the unpredictable ticking of the gas heater.
In these short distances and insufferable spans the boy lives through a night forgotten by history, where the men of the land and soldiers of the shah take to each other with bullet, knife, curse and bludgeon to craft a single composition; the precise choreography of flesh puppets, strung to a thousand stars and pulled as sparring lovers, to and from the flame, to and from the gouge, to and from the stab and shot, their beating hearts like magnets charged to the opposite pulls of victory and death.
We unyoke owl pellets from marrow
in desert meadow. His mouth a pigeon eye,
a torch, a womb turned flower. He, still a boy
dug from cactus skull, undresses into bark
beetles. He unlearns how to hold a gist
with my hand.
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.