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.
DOU YI
My hands were packed in dry ice
Flown across the Pacific and
Stitched onto a man who lost his overseas.
My palms open doors to
Rooms my feet haven't walked through and
Caress a woman my eyes will never see.
It doesn't snow there but my
Nails ache when they touch ice and
Scratch strange characters onto that
Soldier's skin while he's sleeping.
His doctors call it post-traumatic stress but
He knows they're words from a
Language his tongue never learned
Justice.
Justice.
Justice
Across the East Sea a yam farmer
Uses my corneas to see.
She dreams of snow but thinks
It's ashes from a childhood fire bombing.
On the far side of the Atlantic my stomach digests
Food that never passed through my lips
Food my teeth didn't chew
Food my tongue hasn't tasted
Food that could have made this spirit stronger
And act sooner if someone offered it to Dou Yi.
But my heart--
My heart beats in this town,
Pumping blood through a man
Loved by the son of an official,
A son who moved Heaven and Earth for
His Happiness.
His Future.
His New Harmony.
These offerings have given me strength
I feel my spirit reviving!
Justice.
Justice.
Justice.
Justice and burial for the widow Dou Yi
Justice.
Justice.
Justice.
But how can you bury a woman whose butchered body's still living?
Justice.
Justice.
That is my heart. It should beat inside me.
(Dou Yi thrusts her hand into Rocket's chest and retrieves her heart.)
Faye fell to the deck in slow motion. It took forever for this part to end. “Hold still,” he warned as he cut her out of her clothes, the blade cool against her belly. “You won’t be needing these,” he said, and she knew rape wasn’t the last thing. She knew he intended to kill. That was next, when he had done with her. It meant something to him to know he was disgusting her now, hurting her, terrorizing her, it was why he did it, why he kept his eyes on her face, as he labored over her, his good arm corded and trembling, the point of the knife at her throat. She stared up past him to the square of sky framed by the hatch, waiting for it to be over, this now, waiting for the next thing, her next chance, her last chance.
The following day, Pablo set the beetle loose, out of “pity,” he told me. (I believe that he was in Mr. White’s employ.) This had terrible consequences for us and our secret files, for that very night the bugs came rolling out of the jungle in a horrible unstoppable scuttling attack and seized me and carried me off down dim dizzy depths and under mountains and along the bottoms of warm shallow seas like my zombies with only a hollow reed in my mouth to keep air passages in working trim, and through sticky ferns and egg caches and incubators and subterranean cockroach classrooms of strategy and along abandoned mine shafts and eaten-away tunnels in hollowed-out documents in unused stacks in an obscure wing of a forgotten branch of a sealed-off area of the very Library of Congress…
Javier was crazy about tacos. He loved them the way some men love their women: a nice, hard, firm shell. While many men have fallen to the wayside on account of a woman, it is hard to imagine a taco unraveling a man the way it did Javier. After simple surgery to remove a cyst from his gallbladder, one of Javier’s friends snuck him a couple of hard-shelled tacos. He propped himself up in his bed, the green of his hospital pajamas matching the lettuce in his taco, smiled wide, and dug in. After a good meal, he thanked the Lord for his many blessings, including such good friends, then laid himself down to sleep never to wake again. The taco shell had ripped his stitches as it went down.
It was 1943. The agency that helped smuggle Jews into Switzerland had sent them, this third trip, to collect money from the rich and—for the time being—protected Jews in the Italian Zone. Tomorrow they would be returning with enough money for six families to escape to Geneva. Maxim wondered what this farm girl would make of such information. He wondered when his name, and his mother’s and brother’s, would reach the top of the list. He wondered if she would do more than kiss him if he tried. He looked at her, her full lips and pretty face. She turned onto her side and pulled her jacket closer.
DOU YI
My hands were packed in dry ice
Flown across the Pacific and
Stitched onto a man who lost his overseas.
My palms open doors to
Rooms my feet haven't walked through and
Caress a woman my eyes will never see.
It doesn't snow there but my
Nails ache when they touch ice and
Scratch strange characters onto that
Soldier's skin while he's sleeping.
His doctors call it post-traumatic stress but
He knows they're words from a
Language his tongue never learned
Justice.
Justice.
Justice
Across the East Sea a yam farmer
Uses my corneas to see.
She dreams of snow but thinks
It's ashes from a childhood fire bombing.
On the far side of the Atlantic my stomach digests
Food that never passed through my lips
Food my teeth didn't chew
Food my tongue hasn't tasted
Food that could have made this spirit stronger
And act sooner if someone offered it to Dou Yi.
But my heart--
My heart beats in this town,
Pumping blood through a man
Loved by the son of an official,
A son who moved Heaven and Earth for
His Happiness.
His Future.
His New Harmony.
These offerings have given me strength
I feel my spirit reviving!
Justice.
Justice.
Justice.
Justice and burial for the widow Dou Yi
Justice.
Justice.
Justice.
But how can you bury a woman whose butchered body's still living?
Justice.
Justice.
That is my heart. It should beat inside me.
(Dou Yi thrusts her hand into Rocket's chest and retrieves her heart.)
Faye fell to the deck in slow motion. It took forever for this part to end. “Hold still,” he warned as he cut her out of her clothes, the blade cool against her belly. “You won’t be needing these,” he said, and she knew rape wasn’t the last thing. She knew he intended to kill. That was next, when he had done with her. It meant something to him to know he was disgusting her now, hurting her, terrorizing her, it was why he did it, why he kept his eyes on her face, as he labored over her, his good arm corded and trembling, the point of the knife at her throat. She stared up past him to the square of sky framed by the hatch, waiting for it to be over, this now, waiting for the next thing, her next chance, her last chance.
The following day, Pablo set the beetle loose, out of “pity,” he told me. (I believe that he was in Mr. White’s employ.) This had terrible consequences for us and our secret files, for that very night the bugs came rolling out of the jungle in a horrible unstoppable scuttling attack and seized me and carried me off down dim dizzy depths and under mountains and along the bottoms of warm shallow seas like my zombies with only a hollow reed in my mouth to keep air passages in working trim, and through sticky ferns and egg caches and incubators and subterranean cockroach classrooms of strategy and along abandoned mine shafts and eaten-away tunnels in hollowed-out documents in unused stacks in an obscure wing of a forgotten branch of a sealed-off area of the very Library of Congress…
Javier was crazy about tacos. He loved them the way some men love their women: a nice, hard, firm shell. While many men have fallen to the wayside on account of a woman, it is hard to imagine a taco unraveling a man the way it did Javier. After simple surgery to remove a cyst from his gallbladder, one of Javier’s friends snuck him a couple of hard-shelled tacos. He propped himself up in his bed, the green of his hospital pajamas matching the lettuce in his taco, smiled wide, and dug in. After a good meal, he thanked the Lord for his many blessings, including such good friends, then laid himself down to sleep never to wake again. The taco shell had ripped his stitches as it went down.
It was 1943. The agency that helped smuggle Jews into Switzerland had sent them, this third trip, to collect money from the rich and—for the time being—protected Jews in the Italian Zone. Tomorrow they would be returning with enough money for six families to escape to Geneva. Maxim wondered what this farm girl would make of such information. He wondered when his name, and his mother’s and brother’s, would reach the top of the list. He wondered if she would do more than kiss him if he tried. He looked at her, her full lips and pretty face. She turned onto her side and pulled her jacket closer.