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 love American newspapers, the way each section
is folded independently and believes it owns
the world. There’s this brief item in the inter-
national pages: the Chinese government has posted
signs in Tiananmen Square; forbidding laughter.
I’m sure the plastic surgeon would approve, he’d say
the Chinese will look young much longer, their faces
unnaturally smooth, but what I see (although
no photograph accompanies the story) is laughter
busting inside them. I go back to the sports section
and a closeup of a rookie in mind-swing, his face
keeping all the wrong emotions in check.
From a side lane soft with lunar mulch
and thistledown I saw them, clipped alone
on a clothesline, a pair of diaphanous panties
as wide as an elephant’s forehead.
I sighed across the boy-mown lawn
and they shook as though they shed blessings
to the moon and her tongue-tied exiles.
Who would dare pour such panties
along his arms and throat? A murderer, maybe.
The Milky Way was pavement
compared to their luxury. I knew
I wouldn’t outwalk their whispers that night.
Next morning my feet felt like mallets.
I was back in the world where people
wear out, embarrassed by beautiful things,
and a garment fit for a goddess is nothing but big.
The cat was making friends. The previous day when Emmet returned home, he had found four other cats loitering near his building. He worried what would happen if the cats jumped him when he left the house. The cats understood his language, but what passed among their heads was impenetrable to him. He had observed their movements all summer and listened to their sighs and spits and sounds, but he was no closer to infiltrating any part of it as a sign.
And so with the last of my birthday cash
I ordered the Abracadabra Kit.
The ad promised rivals would flee me in terror
and pictured grownups swooning (eyes X’s)
as a boy in tails drove swords through his sister.
I checked the mailbox every day and dreamed
the damage I’d do the Knights, the magic words
I’d speak to blanket them with zits, shrivel
their cocks, cripple their families and pets.
The kit came and of course was crap.
Any time Manny wanted to sell a gun or a big load of weed he’d hand the deal over to one of his main boys. Manny called Chico, Beto, and Paco, then Chevy and Rafa, his right hands cause they was ready to slice open an enemy or blood up a buyer that didn’t pay up, and so they got the juiciest sheep and the most money. Got the most room on the street. The rest of the Lobos was just taggers or third-raters. Tagger babies are the locos who sprayed our sets all over town so people know we own it. They’d dog around here with their spray paint cans and their fake-tough faces, bragging how they did a job up on the freeway signs or almost got busted by the police for messing up a mural. “Hey, homes!” they’d laugh out to each other. “You see the job I did? Got up twenty feet that time!”
LOCAS © 1997 by Yxta Maya Murray; reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Atlantic, Inc.
A friend asks, “What are you waiting for?
The straw that breaks the camel’s back?”
Maybe I am the straw.
Maybe I am hay. I made a list of rhyming words:
Bray, flay, array.
They all seemed to relate to farms, decaying things,
gray days, dismay.
I am recently reckless about making a display
of my unhappiness. Perhaps you may survey it.
Perhaps I may stray from it, go to the wrong home
by accident and say, “Oh! Here already?”
You know I’m fraying and just watch it.
You don’t even try to braid me together.
I love American newspapers, the way each section
is folded independently and believes it owns
the world. There’s this brief item in the inter-
national pages: the Chinese government has posted
signs in Tiananmen Square; forbidding laughter.
I’m sure the plastic surgeon would approve, he’d say
the Chinese will look young much longer, their faces
unnaturally smooth, but what I see (although
no photograph accompanies the story) is laughter
busting inside them. I go back to the sports section
and a closeup of a rookie in mind-swing, his face
keeping all the wrong emotions in check.
From a side lane soft with lunar mulch
and thistledown I saw them, clipped alone
on a clothesline, a pair of diaphanous panties
as wide as an elephant’s forehead.
I sighed across the boy-mown lawn
and they shook as though they shed blessings
to the moon and her tongue-tied exiles.
Who would dare pour such panties
along his arms and throat? A murderer, maybe.
The Milky Way was pavement
compared to their luxury. I knew
I wouldn’t outwalk their whispers that night.
Next morning my feet felt like mallets.
I was back in the world where people
wear out, embarrassed by beautiful things,
and a garment fit for a goddess is nothing but big.
The cat was making friends. The previous day when Emmet returned home, he had found four other cats loitering near his building. He worried what would happen if the cats jumped him when he left the house. The cats understood his language, but what passed among their heads was impenetrable to him. He had observed their movements all summer and listened to their sighs and spits and sounds, but he was no closer to infiltrating any part of it as a sign.
And so with the last of my birthday cash
I ordered the Abracadabra Kit.
The ad promised rivals would flee me in terror
and pictured grownups swooning (eyes X’s)
as a boy in tails drove swords through his sister.
I checked the mailbox every day and dreamed
the damage I’d do the Knights, the magic words
I’d speak to blanket them with zits, shrivel
their cocks, cripple their families and pets.
The kit came and of course was crap.
Any time Manny wanted to sell a gun or a big load of weed he’d hand the deal over to one of his main boys. Manny called Chico, Beto, and Paco, then Chevy and Rafa, his right hands cause they was ready to slice open an enemy or blood up a buyer that didn’t pay up, and so they got the juiciest sheep and the most money. Got the most room on the street. The rest of the Lobos was just taggers or third-raters. Tagger babies are the locos who sprayed our sets all over town so people know we own it. They’d dog around here with their spray paint cans and their fake-tough faces, bragging how they did a job up on the freeway signs or almost got busted by the police for messing up a mural. “Hey, homes!” they’d laugh out to each other. “You see the job I did? Got up twenty feet that time!”
LOCAS © 1997 by Yxta Maya Murray; reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Atlantic, Inc.
A friend asks, “What are you waiting for?
The straw that breaks the camel’s back?”
Maybe I am the straw.
Maybe I am hay. I made a list of rhyming words:
Bray, flay, array.
They all seemed to relate to farms, decaying things,
gray days, dismay.
I am recently reckless about making a display
of my unhappiness. Perhaps you may survey it.
Perhaps I may stray from it, go to the wrong home
by accident and say, “Oh! Here already?”
You know I’m fraying and just watch it.
You don’t even try to braid me together.