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.
The man asks, Do you have a family? My thinking
brushes the air between us like a wet mark
stains white paper. My mother’s mother, dead
twenty-two years. A stone house. The ants I’ve killed.
Robyne, who, when someone hurls
toward me a small cruelty, cries. Memphis in August.
My twin brother crunching ice. All the cousins
I’ve made. Walking amongst cedar trees.
“Three words,” Gaz said. “Motion. Picture. History.” He got up, circled the table as he explained his movie: en route to Earth from a distant solar system, the crew of the Valedictorian crash-lands on a hostile planet inhabited by bat-winged pygmies, lobster-clawed cannibals, two-headed vampires. “That’s where your stuff comes in. I’m going to splice up your movies with mine.” He went on about the mixing-up of genres, chop-suey cinema, bringing together East and West. “We’d be the ambassadors of international film!”
“What’s your thinking on this?” Checkers asked me in Tagalog. “Is this man serious? Is he just an American fool?”
“Ask how much he’ll pay,” I said, “get twenty percent more, give him the movies, and show him to the door.”
I see her windows open in the rain, laundry in the windows—
she rides a wild pony for my birthday,
a white pony on the seventh floor.
“And where will we keep it?” “On the balcony!”
the pony neighing on the balcony for nine weeks.
At the center of my life: my mother dances,
yes here, as in childhood, my mother
asks to describe the stages of my happiness—
she speaks of soups, she is of their telling:
between the regiments of saucers and towels,
she moves so fast—she is motionless,
opening and closing doors.
But what was happiness? A pony on the balcony!
My mother's past, a cloak she wore on her shoulder.
I drew an axis through the afternoon
to see her, sixty, courting a foreign language—
young, not young—my mother
gallops a pony on the seventh floor.
She becomes a stranger and acts herself, opens
what is shut, shuts what is open.
His hand had fallen as she moved. His expression was perplexed, one she’d seen a hundred times on teachers’ faces when they turned from the problem under study to that of the class’s persistent incomprehension. She turned away, to her flowers, and when she straightened, felt the shift in his gaze as if she’d been inside of it and now it were being withdrawn, unpinning her will, that went to him and away and stayed all at once. He said, “I’ve frightened you.”
This is the address to the station that be playin the news, she say. Imma write to them and they gonna do a story on us.
I’m like, Yo, Kandese, that’s a good idea.
My mama put on the news every night. I didn’t know you could send them letters.
Ain’t no news cameras comin down here, Bernita say. Cops don’t even come here.
She love rainin on parades.
In his bath my son looks half-
drowned,
lying so still,
his hair a scarf of weed,
his eyes closed,
and only the water breathing.
He practices
in his porcelain bed
his resting,
rehearsing
until the water takes cold
and he shivers a little against it.
The man asks, Do you have a family? My thinking
brushes the air between us like a wet mark
stains white paper. My mother’s mother, dead
twenty-two years. A stone house. The ants I’ve killed.
Robyne, who, when someone hurls
toward me a small cruelty, cries. Memphis in August.
My twin brother crunching ice. All the cousins
I’ve made. Walking amongst cedar trees.
“Three words,” Gaz said. “Motion. Picture. History.” He got up, circled the table as he explained his movie: en route to Earth from a distant solar system, the crew of the Valedictorian crash-lands on a hostile planet inhabited by bat-winged pygmies, lobster-clawed cannibals, two-headed vampires. “That’s where your stuff comes in. I’m going to splice up your movies with mine.” He went on about the mixing-up of genres, chop-suey cinema, bringing together East and West. “We’d be the ambassadors of international film!”
“What’s your thinking on this?” Checkers asked me in Tagalog. “Is this man serious? Is he just an American fool?”
“Ask how much he’ll pay,” I said, “get twenty percent more, give him the movies, and show him to the door.”
I see her windows open in the rain, laundry in the windows—
she rides a wild pony for my birthday,
a white pony on the seventh floor.
“And where will we keep it?” “On the balcony!”
the pony neighing on the balcony for nine weeks.
At the center of my life: my mother dances,
yes here, as in childhood, my mother
asks to describe the stages of my happiness—
she speaks of soups, she is of their telling:
between the regiments of saucers and towels,
she moves so fast—she is motionless,
opening and closing doors.
But what was happiness? A pony on the balcony!
My mother's past, a cloak she wore on her shoulder.
I drew an axis through the afternoon
to see her, sixty, courting a foreign language—
young, not young—my mother
gallops a pony on the seventh floor.
She becomes a stranger and acts herself, opens
what is shut, shuts what is open.
His hand had fallen as she moved. His expression was perplexed, one she’d seen a hundred times on teachers’ faces when they turned from the problem under study to that of the class’s persistent incomprehension. She turned away, to her flowers, and when she straightened, felt the shift in his gaze as if she’d been inside of it and now it were being withdrawn, unpinning her will, that went to him and away and stayed all at once. He said, “I’ve frightened you.”
This is the address to the station that be playin the news, she say. Imma write to them and they gonna do a story on us.
I’m like, Yo, Kandese, that’s a good idea.
My mama put on the news every night. I didn’t know you could send them letters.
Ain’t no news cameras comin down here, Bernita say. Cops don’t even come here.
She love rainin on parades.
In his bath my son looks half-
drowned,
lying so still,
his hair a scarf of weed,
his eyes closed,
and only the water breathing.
He practices
in his porcelain bed
his resting,
rehearsing
until the water takes cold
and he shivers a little against it.