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.
Time moved both fast and slow, and neither speed synced up with her fears as she stood at the head of the line. The tellers looked too chipper for a Monday morning. Did they even have money on Mondays? she wondered. Shouldn’t she have come on a Friday? She couldn’t remember why she opened the stickup note, just that she did, and that her boyfriend, the first and only boy she’d ever dated, was the one who had penned it: This is a stickup. Give me all your monie.
The misspelling stopped her.
“Next in line,” a teller called.
Knowledge herself had quit school in the ninth grade but she couldn’t believe that he had misspelled money. “What kind of an idiot can’t spell money?” she told me. “How fucking stupid do you have to be? And if he’s that stupid, how stupid am I for robbing a bank for him?”
While I sit with all the other patients in the waiting room, I always think that I will ask Dr. Wald what exactly is happening to my eyes, but when I go into his examining room alone it is dark, with a circle of light on the wall, and the doctor is standing with his back to me arranging silver instruments on a cloth. The big chair is empty for me to go sit in, and each time I feel as if I have gone into a dream straight from being awake, the way you do sometimes at night, and I go to the chair without saying anything.
In the locker room we unhooked our bras, hoping
shower steam kept us invisible,
but our souls showed, our prepubescent fuzz.
Stockings hung from shower rods like biblical snakes.
Who would learn first? we wondered, and drew breasts
in goofy loops until Sister Angelica banged
her ruler, and we printed the same confession
a hundred times, her shadow crossing
our spiral notebooks, her eyes like old
spiders. Ginnie learned and got a heart-shaped
locket, then a shotgun wedding ring.
Heather gave birth so often she forgot,
she said, what caused it. Becky’s womb was lost
in an abortionist’s garage. We said good-bye
in the Immaculate Conception parking lot.
Still, nuns click their beads in memory of us,
how we strolled, arms linked, singing,
into the world of women where all deaths begin.
The dog is God.
It knows it is God.
It is God living with God.
Even in the rain,
the esters, the pheromones,
calligraphy of the sacred,
the great head points into the wind,
the blood thrashes in the thick veins.
The language of the feces, urine,
species, rut, offal, decay –
nothing is hidden from the dog,
who keeps its own counsel,
leading you by the leash.
I draw the curtains. The room darkens, but
the mirror still reflects a crescent moon.
I pull the crescent out, a rigid curve
that softens into a length of cloth.
I wrap the cloth around my eyes,
and I’m peering through a crack in the wall
revealing a landscape of snow.
Time moved both fast and slow, and neither speed synced up with her fears as she stood at the head of the line. The tellers looked too chipper for a Monday morning. Did they even have money on Mondays? she wondered. Shouldn’t she have come on a Friday? She couldn’t remember why she opened the stickup note, just that she did, and that her boyfriend, the first and only boy she’d ever dated, was the one who had penned it: This is a stickup. Give me all your monie.
The misspelling stopped her.
“Next in line,” a teller called.
Knowledge herself had quit school in the ninth grade but she couldn’t believe that he had misspelled money. “What kind of an idiot can’t spell money?” she told me. “How fucking stupid do you have to be? And if he’s that stupid, how stupid am I for robbing a bank for him?”
While I sit with all the other patients in the waiting room, I always think that I will ask Dr. Wald what exactly is happening to my eyes, but when I go into his examining room alone it is dark, with a circle of light on the wall, and the doctor is standing with his back to me arranging silver instruments on a cloth. The big chair is empty for me to go sit in, and each time I feel as if I have gone into a dream straight from being awake, the way you do sometimes at night, and I go to the chair without saying anything.
In the locker room we unhooked our bras, hoping
shower steam kept us invisible,
but our souls showed, our prepubescent fuzz.
Stockings hung from shower rods like biblical snakes.
Who would learn first? we wondered, and drew breasts
in goofy loops until Sister Angelica banged
her ruler, and we printed the same confession
a hundred times, her shadow crossing
our spiral notebooks, her eyes like old
spiders. Ginnie learned and got a heart-shaped
locket, then a shotgun wedding ring.
Heather gave birth so often she forgot,
she said, what caused it. Becky’s womb was lost
in an abortionist’s garage. We said good-bye
in the Immaculate Conception parking lot.
Still, nuns click their beads in memory of us,
how we strolled, arms linked, singing,
into the world of women where all deaths begin.
The dog is God.
It knows it is God.
It is God living with God.
Even in the rain,
the esters, the pheromones,
calligraphy of the sacred,
the great head points into the wind,
the blood thrashes in the thick veins.
The language of the feces, urine,
species, rut, offal, decay –
nothing is hidden from the dog,
who keeps its own counsel,
leading you by the leash.
I draw the curtains. The room darkens, but
the mirror still reflects a crescent moon.
I pull the crescent out, a rigid curve
that softens into a length of cloth.
I wrap the cloth around my eyes,
and I’m peering through a crack in the wall
revealing a landscape of snow.