Whiting Award Winners

The boy’s name is Cecil Mayberry; he is twelve, white, and he knows something. He knows what his mother is going to make for supper, pot roast and green Jell-O salad; he knows that the Russians have put a Sputnik in the sky. But these are not the items that are just now on Cecil’s mind. He is thinking about a man, a waterman, lying face down in a tidal pool two hundred yards from where he sits. Cecil knows the man’s name, Grayson “Tommie” Todman, and he knows that two .22-caliber bullets have made a mess of Tommie’s head. He knows the first one entered just below the right cheekline, cutting short Tommie’s last Fuck You to the world, and the second one grazed through his hair before nipping in at the peak and blowing out a portion of Tommie’s unlamented brain.

In fact, this is going to be the first time in Cecil’s life—but not the last—that he is an undisputed expert on a certain subject. He knows who shot Tommie, and why.

We do not mean to complain. We know how it is.

In older, even sadder cultures the worst possible sorts

have been playing hot and cold with people’s lives

for much longer. Like Perrow says,

We’ll all have baboon hearts one of these days.

We wintered with ample fuel and real tomatoes.

We were allowed to roam, sniffing and chewing

at the tufted crust. We were let to breathe.

That is, we respirated. Now the soft clocks

have gorged themselves on our time. Yet

as our hair blanches and comes out

in hanks, we can tell it is nearly spring –

the students shed their black coats

on the green; we begin to see shade.

Lo, this is the breastbone’s embraceable light.

We are here. Still breathing and constellated.

Mountain tips soften after so much rain,

the wild guesses of birds blending with air

and the uppermost buds, with a godlike

promotion, burst open.

Especially beautiful

are the brown and drunken bats

who nosedive down the barnside,

not quite earthbroken.

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.

I’m good enough to get the once-over in the bar at The Restaurant, I see them thinking my

smallness is appealing, my ass and face are cute enough, I see them thinking that short haircut

might be sexy. I’m always in a backless cocktail dress and heels, I’m flat chested and a tad

muscular so they ask me if I’m a dancer and say Call me sometime, let’s have a drink. It took

me a while to understand you’re supposed to work that for your money but you can let the

willingness fall right off your face when you turn around. It took me a while to understand that of

course men fling their entreaties out in swarms, like schools of sperm, hoping one will stick.

Your phone alarm went off at eight. “I only got in a fight one time,” you told me after I told you my dream. “I was playing in the sandbox with my friend and he got mad at me for beating him in a game, so he punched me in the face. My mom took one look at me and said, ‘Never let anyone hit you.’ So she made me go back there and fight him.”

“How’d that go?” I asked.

“I felt bad! We were both crying the whole time. I think I won. I bit him a few times.”

“Sounds excessive.”

“Nuh-uh! When you grow up in poor communities, you have to do violent things to survive. Because if people think they can mess with you, they’ll keep messing with you, and your life will be ten times harder than if you just do unpleasant things. Like bite a boy on the playground. Yeah!” you affirmed with a prim little nod.