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.
“You know I’m gonna pay you back,” my mother said, then winked at him.
He pulled out a ten-dollar bill and handed it to her, just like that. “Gracias,” she said, then headed inside.
She was always like this, learning my friends’ names, getting familiar enough to ask for money, or cigarettes, or drugs. It would be this way into my late teens, when I’m grown, when I’m a woman. It was like I was the only one getting older, changing. But Mami, she was frozen in time as that twenty-year-old who listened to Madonna and thought my father was running around on her, still haunted by those same monsters, and even years after we’d left Puerto Rico, she believed we still owned the house in Luquillo, the liquor store, that we would go back there, pick up right where we left off. That it would all be waiting for us to get back.
My job here is a strange one. The description I found in the classifieds read: “Overnight counselor-in-residence for developmentally disabled teenagers with behavior problems.” I didn’t know exactly what that meant. But it went on to read: “Some meal preparation required; counselor is able to sleep during shift.”
At the time it seemed that it might suit me, the sleeping part in particular.
Since we began to live in Desolation years ago, friends have said that if it were not for their children, professions, political activism, mortgages, debts to spouses of ex-choice, and bad knees, they would gladly do what we do. “We uphold the culture of our generation,” they tell us. “You and Mark live its dream side.” Their envy does not detect the physical costs of professional vagrancy. Far from armchairs, ceilings, sock drawers, and a street address, but within sight of the downslide toward retirement, we are out here dragging heavy rafts and sleeping on the ground, underpants full of sand. When others travel with us on a ranger patrol, at the end of the trip Mark always asks the rhetorical “Would you like to have my job?” “It has been really nice,” they answer, sprinting up the boat ramp to their Land Cruisers.
To miss my life in Kabul is to tongue
pears laced with needles. I had no life
in Kabul. How, then, can I trust my mind’s long corridor,
its longing for before? I have a faint depression
polluting my heart, sings the lake. That there is music
in everything if you tune into it
devastates me. Even trauma sounds like Traum,
the German word for dream.
Though I cannot lavish praise on stamina
alone, I must acknowledge a femme
fortitude. Last night, I tell myself,
a misstep at battery’s expense
so as to never consider the sentience
of a pleasure machine.
How her trembling must have lullabied
my drunk tongue the intricacies
of sexual decorum even in sleep,
how she may have throbbed
all night beside me, anticipating her
own reciprocal and tender invasion.
Things weather fast here, soon bird will be bone,
brittle and white, dead twig snapped underfoot
where the sky alters in seconds, shine to shower,
and harsher truths hit home hour after hour –
the sundew snagging flies, settling to eat,
a fat gull’s fractured keen that cuts through stone.
“You know I’m gonna pay you back,” my mother said, then winked at him.
He pulled out a ten-dollar bill and handed it to her, just like that. “Gracias,” she said, then headed inside.
She was always like this, learning my friends’ names, getting familiar enough to ask for money, or cigarettes, or drugs. It would be this way into my late teens, when I’m grown, when I’m a woman. It was like I was the only one getting older, changing. But Mami, she was frozen in time as that twenty-year-old who listened to Madonna and thought my father was running around on her, still haunted by those same monsters, and even years after we’d left Puerto Rico, she believed we still owned the house in Luquillo, the liquor store, that we would go back there, pick up right where we left off. That it would all be waiting for us to get back.
My job here is a strange one. The description I found in the classifieds read: “Overnight counselor-in-residence for developmentally disabled teenagers with behavior problems.” I didn’t know exactly what that meant. But it went on to read: “Some meal preparation required; counselor is able to sleep during shift.”
At the time it seemed that it might suit me, the sleeping part in particular.
Since we began to live in Desolation years ago, friends have said that if it were not for their children, professions, political activism, mortgages, debts to spouses of ex-choice, and bad knees, they would gladly do what we do. “We uphold the culture of our generation,” they tell us. “You and Mark live its dream side.” Their envy does not detect the physical costs of professional vagrancy. Far from armchairs, ceilings, sock drawers, and a street address, but within sight of the downslide toward retirement, we are out here dragging heavy rafts and sleeping on the ground, underpants full of sand. When others travel with us on a ranger patrol, at the end of the trip Mark always asks the rhetorical “Would you like to have my job?” “It has been really nice,” they answer, sprinting up the boat ramp to their Land Cruisers.
To miss my life in Kabul is to tongue
pears laced with needles. I had no life
in Kabul. How, then, can I trust my mind’s long corridor,
its longing for before? I have a faint depression
polluting my heart, sings the lake. That there is music
in everything if you tune into it
devastates me. Even trauma sounds like Traum,
the German word for dream.
Though I cannot lavish praise on stamina
alone, I must acknowledge a femme
fortitude. Last night, I tell myself,
a misstep at battery’s expense
so as to never consider the sentience
of a pleasure machine.
How her trembling must have lullabied
my drunk tongue the intricacies
of sexual decorum even in sleep,
how she may have throbbed
all night beside me, anticipating her
own reciprocal and tender invasion.
Things weather fast here, soon bird will be bone,
brittle and white, dead twig snapped underfoot
where the sky alters in seconds, shine to shower,
and harsher truths hit home hour after hour –
the sundew snagging flies, settling to eat,
a fat gull’s fractured keen that cuts through stone.