The 2017 Whiting Awards

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ABOUT THE WHITING FOUNDATION AND AWARD 6

INTRODUCTION BY JO ANN BEARD

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THE WINNERS OF THE WHITING AWARD, 1985–2017

W H IT ING F O U ND ATI O N TR U S TE E S

Peter Pennoyer, President John N. Irwin III, Treasurer Amanda Foreman Kumar Mahadeva Kate Douglas Torrey Magdalena Zavalía Miguens, Secretary T R U ST EES EM ER I TI

Antonia M. Grumbach Robert M. Pennoyer

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ABOUT THE

ing t i Wh

ard w A nd a n tio a nd u o F

The Whiting Foundation provides support for writers and scholars who astonish us by expanding the boundaries of art and understanding. Since 1985, the Foundation has supported creative writing through the Whiting Awards, given annually to ten emerging writers in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama. The awards are based on early accomplishment and the promise of great work to come.

The Foundation invites nominators from across the country whose work brings them in contact with individuals of extraordinary talent to propose a single candidate each. The pool of nominators changes annually, and has included writers, professors, editors, critics, booksellers, artistic directors, dramaturgs, and directors of literary festivals. Winners are chosen by a selection committee comprised of a small group of recognized writers, literary scholars, and editors appointed every year by the Foundation. By tradition, nominators and selectors serve anonymously to allow them complete freedom in choosing the strongest candidates. Whiting winners have gone on to receive numerous prestigious fellowships and awards, and their work has shaped and advanced literature in this country over the past three decades.

The Foundation’s other programs in support of literature and the humanities include the Creative Nonfiction Grant to enable the completion of deeply-researched works in progress written for a general audience, and the Public Engagement Fellowship for faculty who are undertaking projects to infuse the humanities into public culture at the local and national level. All the programs are intended to support fresh thought and help bring it to the audience who most needs it.

6

INTRODUCTIO N

ard e nB n A Jo

I am Joe’s Brainard1

I remember having three part-time clerical jobs, one of them working for a smart young woman who complained to me if there weren’t enough fake strawberries in the flavored cream cheese she liked on her bagel. Initially she felt funny asking me to get it for her every morning, but she got past it. Once when I was outside guarding her illegally parked car, I stepped inside the building and let it get a ticket, which she jokingly told me I should pay for. I said okay in a jokingly handwringing manner and suddenly we both felt uncomfortable and she closed her door.

I remember the best thing about my life was my dog and then my dog died.

I remember my friend who flew a Cessna offered to drop me off in Maine to visit some people who had known my dog. When I agreed, he said, “This is because you don’t care if you die, right?” On the deafening, climbing and plummeting flight, when asked to “keep an eye out for other planes” I just did it, without screaming.

I remember sleeping on their foldout sofa, with two greyhounds that were as solid as porch pillars on either side of me. Morning tea and them (the people) agreeing with me that the writing thing wasn’t working out that well. Me defensively saying that giving up didn’t make sense either and them loyally agreeing with that too. All of us going to the park to eat doughnuts out of a bag and watch the greyhounds soar like fighter jets over the ground.

I remember I had to leave a forwarding number on my answering machine, in case anyone needed to get hold of me about their cream

cheese, and while we were sitting around deciding about lunch the phone rang in the kitchen and it was a man from the Whiting Foundation, for me.

I remember I cried.

I remember taking my friends to celebrate in downtown Portland at a restaurant owned by Tabitha King. Out of the blue, I felt like introducing myself to Tabitha King, and telling her that I had read her book and why I liked it.

I remember the Morgan Library at night and someone pinning a white boutonniere on the shoulder of my black dress. A girlfriend put red lipstick on me, so that when I looked in the mirror I could see my mother, long-dead but there to witness her daughter receiving a great honor. I listened to the speaker, an eminent poet, and at the end heard him say that we should take part of our award and buy something important that would forever remind us of this moment, like a rug.

I remember the only coherent thought I had that entire night was that eminent poets really didn’t get what it meant to be a struggling artist. And yet…I am looking at that rug right now, on the floor next to my desk. It’s imaginary, of course, because I wasn’t that smart. It’s small but beautiful—the background is brick red crossed with lines of blue and purple. I saw it in a market in Istanbul a decade ago. The rug dealer, a seemingly amiable man, had become so tired of waiting for me to decide I couldn’t afford it that he produced a gun and held it to my companion’s head. He was doing it jokingly, of course, like the young boss at my old job. Before my job became this, to find the essay in everything I remember.

1 If you get this reference you’re old.

is the author of a novel, In Zanesville, and a collection of autobiographical essays, The Boys of My Youth. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, Best American Essays, and other magazines and anthologies. She received a 1997 Whiting Award in nonfiction as well as fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts.

JO ANN BEARD

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CYNTHIA

Kayden, come here. Do you know who I am?

KAYDEN

Aunt Cynthia CYNTHIA

No, I’m your sister. Sister Cynthia. Because your mommy and daddy had me when they were very, very young. And then they didn’t really want me like they wanted you, so.

So you know what that means? That means you’re a very lucky girl. And that means you have a big sister. And right now, I know it feels like I’m more of a mommy than a sister, but one day we’re gonna both be grown-ups and we’re gonna talk about grown-up things and we’ll be like sisters. I’m excited for that. I’m excited for that to happen.

(Kayden looks at her.)

CYNTHIA

Your mom and dad are pretty nice now, huh?

(Kayden nods.)

CYNTHIA

That’s good.

They don’t yell at you or— KAYDEN

Sometimes they yell CYNTHIA

Well, yeah, sometimes they have to yell.

They take you to the park and the ice-skating rink...

KAYDEN

Dairy Queen CYNTHIA

Oh yeah? That’s good. That’s cool.

They let you go to the bathroom whenever you need to?

12

KAYDEN

Yeah CYNTHIA

That’s good.

(Kayden looks at her.)

CYNTHIA

You’re very shy, do you know that? I think your mommy and daddy think there’s something wrong with you but I just think you’re shy and quiet. Do you think that’s true?

KAYDEN

I don’t know CYNTHIA

You shouldn’t be shy. Being shy doesn’t get you very far in life. You have to put yourself out there, you know. You have to stand out.

People say it’s the shy, nerdy kids who come back and get revenge later in life, but they’re wrong. It’s the kids with charisma, you know what I’m saying? The homecoming queen. That’s who you want to be.

That’s who dominates everyone else from the time she’s born until the time she dies. It’s true.

(Pause.)

Come on. Let’s practice. I say dance, you dance. Got it? I say dance, you dance. Okay. Dance.

(Kayden doesn’t move.)

CYNTHIA

You have to dance. You have to move. You have to not be afraid to make a fool of yourself. Come on. Dance. Dance. Dance, Kayden.

Dance.

(Kayden doesn’t move.)

CYNTHIA

Give me your shoes.

KAYDEN

What?

CYNTHIA

You didn’t dance. Now you have to give me your shoes.

(Kayden takes off her shoes and gives them to Cynthia.)

CYNTHIA

Okay. Let’s try this again. Dance. I want you to dance. Come on. I don’t care how you dance. I don’t care how well you dance. Just move. Just moooove, god dammit. Do something.

(Kayden doesn’t move.)

CYNTHIA

Give me your pants.

(Kayden takes off her pants and hands them to Cynthia.)

CYNTHIA

I bet you feel pretty silly without your pants. And it’s cold outside.

And another storm is coming soon. And you’re going to be without your shoes and without your pants and who knows what else. So you better dance, don’t you think?

(Kayden bends at the knee a little bit—up and down.)

CYNTHIA

Are you dancing? I can’t tell. Is that dancing?

From Baby Screams Miracle

CLARE BARRON is a playwright and actor from Wenatchee, Washington. Her plays have been produced by Page 73, Woolly Mammoth, Clubbed Thumb, and The Bushwick Starr, and will appear at Playwrights Horizons and Steppenwolf in 2018.

She is the recipient of an Obie Award, the Paula Vogel Playwriting Award at The Vineyard, and the Page 73 Playwriting Fellowship. Barron was also the co-winner of the inaugural 2015 Relentless Award established in honor of Philip Seymour Hoffman for her play Dance Nation. She lives in Brooklyn.

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FICTION

in g a Be n Je

For the next few weeks she mentally projected Mr. Disgusting’s face onto whatever surface she was cleaning, just for the pleasure of scrubbing it off. The procedure worked best on tiled bathroom walls. She lathered the tiles with Ajax, then, covering her mouth with the collar of her T-shirt to guard against bleach throat, she scrubbed out his left eye, obliterated his right with a furious scribbling motion, and then expanded her stroke to remove his mocking eyebrows and long black hair. She scrubbed vigorously, her hands sweating in rubber gloves, her breath moistening her T-shirt. When his face was gone at last, she doused the tiles with water from the tap. Her mind often seemed to clear itself of debris, and in its place, she felt the pleasant but slightly irritating sensation of having a word on the tip of her tongue.

A month later her anger suddenly dissipated and was replaced again by longing. So he’d almost killed her and then told her she looked like a fish — big deal, people made mistakes. She was getting over it.

Besides, he’d apologize profusely via voicemail, and on her doorstep he’d left a Japanese dictionary in which he’d circled the words for contrite, shame, repentant, confession, apology, remorse, touch, please, help, and telephone. That certainly counted for something.

She dialed his number but his phone was disconnected. She stopped by the Hawthorne a few times, but he was never in his room.

She checked his other haunts — the Owl Diner, the Lowell Public Library, and the Last Safe and Deposit, a bank turned dive bar — all without luck. Since he loved getting mail, she sent him a postcard of a Henry Darger drawing featuring little girls with penises. On the back she wrote, “How’s it goin? You’re prolly just hanging around, being rad.

I miss you a super ton, dude. I’m like totally lost without you. I fully

want to make out with you again.” He loved it when she wrote in her native tongue.

Two weeks later, on her twenty-fourth birthday, she received a large cardboard box in the mail. No return address, but she recognized Mr. Disgusting’s cramped handwriting and felt a flutter in her chest. At last, he’d come to his senses. And, he remembered her birthday. Not bad for an old man. No doubt he sent her something he’d found in the trash, but whatever — she’d take it.

She brought the box to bed and sat with her back against the brick wall. Inside the box were two smaller boxes, one much larger than the other, but each carefully wrapped in the wrinkled maps of her native state. Nice touch. With a red Sharpie he’d drawn a heart around her birthplace, Santa Monica, and another around her hometown, Torrance.

She wondered what had possessed him; he definitely wasn’t the heartdrawing type.

Inside the first box was everything she’d ever given him: love letters; purposely bad cowboy poetry; several drawings of her hands and feet; an eight-inch lock of hair she’d meant to donate to Locks of Love; a deck of hand-illustrated German playing cards; a small lump made of Japanese silk thread; and a locket with a skeleton keyhole, the doors of which opened to reveal a photograph of her very beautiful left eye.

The other box contained photographs of her box, photographs for which she’d reluctantly posed atop his bed at the Hawthorne last summer. He’d never showed them to her, but then she’d never asked to see them, either. She’d examined herself with a hand mirror before, but there was something about the pictures that unsettled and sickened her. It was like looking at graphic photographs of her own internal organs.

Happy birthday to me, she thought. Thanks for negating our entire relationship.

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Perhaps she was more sentimental than she was willing to acknowledge. Never in a million years would she send someone a box like this.

Before the package, her plans that evening had been to order pho from the Viet Cafe and watch Liquid Sky on VHS. Instead, she opened a bottle of Cabernet, brought it to bed, and emptied the contents of the first box onto the comforter. She picked up a love letter. Her handwriting looked frumpy and reminded her of uncombed hair. She rummaged through the rest of the contents, and that’s when she found the note written on the back of a beaver shot:

My Little Wallaby, I’m leaving the planet shortly. I apologize for the tragic ending. I always told you I wouldn’t make it past fifty. Please don’t take my departure personally.

You know very well it has nothing to do with you. My pain is ancient and I’m tired of carrying it around.

That’s all this is.

Enclosed are all the precious gifts you’ve given me. I only wish I could take them with me. I would have left them here, but I couldn’t stand the thought of these vultures picking through it. And I thought it would be nice for you to have both sides of our correspondence. How often does that happen? This way our biographers will have to do less running around.

Please don’t despair. I am toothless, dickless, and twice your age — be happy to be rid of me. You need someone younger and more optimistic, who can fuck you properly and perhaps get you pregnant someday.

Some unsolicited advice on the way out: get the hell out of here. You have no real ties so it’s stupid for you to stay. The reason you’re so comfortable in other people’s homes, Mona, is because you don’t have one. Keep searching.

Go to the desert. I’ve always wanted to live in New Mexico, and I can easily picture you living in Taos, a small town I passed through when I was your age. Why not move there and start over? Rent an adobe casita. Paint some pictures. Join a healthy cult of some kind. Get a guru. Surround yourself with [illegible]. I really want you to be —

The sentence ended there. She flipped the photograph over, hoping he’d finished the thought, but there was only the graphic image of her vag in all its squishy, purple glory.

She didn’t believe he’d actually killed himself. He was too attached to his problems. She’d always maintained that if everyone were forced to throw their problems in the garbage, each person would show up at the dump the following day and sift through any amount of muck to find them again.

From Pretend I’m Dead

JEN BEAGIN holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of California, Irvine and has published stories in Juked and Faultline, among other journals and literary magazines. Her novel, Pretend I’m Dead, was published by TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press in 2015. She lives in Hudson, New York.

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NONFICTION

ntú a C co s i nc a r F

When I called, a small boy answered the phone. I introduced myself as a friend of José. Are you his son? I asked. The boy was silent. I work with your dad, I continued. I heard he’s at the border, trying to get across. Is he OK? The boy breathed heavily into the receiver and I wondered if I still sounded like a border cop, if there was something undisguisable in my voice that told him I had once pursued men like his father through the desert. After several moments he finally spoke. Do you want my mom to call you? he asked. Sure, I said, and then he hung up.

Half an hour later my phone rang. Soy Lupe, the woman on the other line said, esposa de José. She was silent for a moment, as if considering how much to tell me. Listen, I wanted to blurt out, it’s too hot, it’s not worth crossing, José should wait. I’ve been waiting to hear from him for days, Lupe finally said. Just before you called I was on the phone with the Mexican Consulate. They told me José was arrested two days ago by Border Patrol. He has a court hearing later today, at two.

They didn’t say where. Lupe’s voice sounded thin on the other line, as if it were all she could do just to repeat what had been told to her. Today at two? I paced, old procedures and timelines rising up in my mind. I think I know where he’ll be, I told her. Can I call you back?

•

It had been months since I talked to Morales, but I called him anyways. Hey vato, do you still work at the courthouse? I asked. Sí, guey, he said, but not today. Por qué? I think I have a friend that’s getting Streamlined. No way. Yeah, a guy I work with. Shit, Morales said. A few years out of the patrol and you’re out there making friends with mojados? I tried to find a comeback. I’m just kidding, Morales said before I could reply—I know how it is. Of course you do, I shot back at him, did you think I forgot about your mojado roots? You better not forget to wear your uniform when you show up to court, guey, they might accidentally deport your ass. Oh damn, Morales laughed, shots fired!

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I asked Morales if the Streamline proceedings were still open to the public. Yeah, he said, hippies and protesters go all the time. Second floor of the courthouse— be there by 1:30. I looked at my watch. Will I be able to see him? Sure, Morales said, if you can find him. Everyone will be facing away from you, pendejo. Can I bring his family? I asked.

I don’t know if they have papers. It shouldn’t matter, Morales assured me, no one will mess with them. Will they be able to talk to him? I asked.

No, he answered, matter-of-factly. But if you sit on the righthand side of the courtroom, in the front two rows next to the wall, you should be able to catch his eye as the marshals walk him out.

•

Outside the courthouse, Lupe introduced me to her three boys and the pastor from their church. The proceedings had just begun as we entered the courtroom, and I immediately noticed the smell—a smell I hadn’t encountered in years, the sharp scent of dozens of unwashed bodies that had struggled through the desert for days, skin sweating and sunbaked. From his bench the judge loomed over the room in black robes, a small white face peering out from beneath the massive seal of the United States of America, a giant eagle with its head turned away.

Are you a citizen of Mexico? Sí. On or about August 31st, 2015, did you enter the United States near Lukeville, Arizona? Sí. Did you come through a designated port of entry? No. How do you plead in the charge of illegal entry? Culpable, señor.

It occurred to me that I had never before seen so many men and women in shackles, never laid eyes on a group of people so diminished—and while I had apprehended and processed countless men and women for deportation, many of whom I sent to pass through this very same room, there was something dreadfully altered in their presence here between towering and cavernous walls, lorded over by foreign men with little inkling of the dark desert nights or the hard glare of the

sun, the sweeping expanses of stone and shale, the foot-packed earthen trails, the bodies laid bare before the elements, the trembling of the bones from heat, from cold, from want of water. In my encounters with migrants at the end of their road through the desert, there was always the closeness of the failed journey, the fading but still-hot spark from the last flame of the crossing. But here, in the stale and swirling air of the courthouse, it was clear that something vital had gone missing in the days since apprehension, some final essence of the spirit had been stamped out in the slow crush of confinement.

The pastor leaned and pointed toward a grey-haired man who had just stood to walk to the front of the courtroom. He whispered to the boys—it’s your dad. They looked at the man and then at each other, wide-eyed. Es él, the pastor said, gesturing again, es él. The boys sat forward in their seats as if to get closer. No está, the boys confirmed with each other, no, no está. Yes, the pastor said emphatically, that’s your father. You don’t recognize him because his hair has grown out and he has stubble now, but look, you can even see his bald spot. The boys looked at each other. Él es, Lupe said, finally. It’s him. The boys sat on their hands, dumbstruck, their mouths agape.

From The Line Becomes a River

FRANCISCO CANTÚ served as a border patrol agent for the United States Border Patrol from 2008 to 2012. A former Fulbright fellow, he recently received an MFA in Nonfiction from the University of Arizona. His essays and translations appear frequently in Guernica, and his work can also be found in The Best American Essays 2016, Ploughshares, and Orion, among others. He lives in Tucson, Arizona. The Line Becomes a River will be published by Riverhead Books in February 2018.

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Scene 1: Mr. Green’s Farewell To His Class MR. GREEN, a 54-year-old high school French teacher in rumpled clothes, addresses his class. He stands next to a wastebasket, holding a stack of papers.

He reads a name off each paper then drops the sheet into the wastebasket.

MR. GREEN

For Edouard -– or should I say Ed? -- Disappointing.

For Madeleine –- or should I say Mei Ling? -- Dreadful.

For Christophe –- or should I say Topher? -- Deficient.

“D.” “D.” “D.” The results of your exam? Deplorable.

Four weeks we spend on two verbs. The result? Disaster!

Two verbs! Granted, they are irregular. But that’s no excuse, for these forms -Do. Not. Change.

They are immutable!

More reliable than the people in your lives. More stable than governments. More dependable than churches or philosophies. These verbs are your deliverance!

Commit the patterns to memory. Determine the person, the number, the tense. Then remember the form. That’s all there is. To conjugation.

Conjugation. Such a beautiful word. Such a beautiful act.

Shall we attempt the Imperfect before the final frost of winter? Consider the Conditional before swallows sail back in spring? Sally forth with the Subjunctive before our fecund and flowering females ooze out another assemblage of unexpected infants?

Or are we stuck in Present Tense forever?

Can you imagine? Stuck in Present Tense? Time would grind to a halt.

Time would stand still! No access to the past. No road to the future.

He reads more names and drops more test papers into the wastebasket.

Yes, there are –For Matthieu -- or Matt -- Difficulties.

For Rémy -- or Rohit -- Dangers.

For Brigitte -- or Britney -- Disorientation.

Sometimes –Like when I was your age: Delirium!

But French. Is. Worth. It. French is contemplation.

French is inspiration.

French is liberation.

French makes existence bearable.

Perhaps you ponder how your parents persist existing here? Side by side with steel mills dead and derelict for decades?

Perhaps they’ve numbed themselves cashing unemployment checks to purchase methamphetamines.

But I like to believe it’s because, before closing their eyes every night, they whisper into their pillows the honeyed verses of Verlaine and Baudelaire. And all that is weighty and dark in their souls is expelled into vapor.

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For that’s what I do.

Without French, life would be unfair!

But with French, there is expectation.

Anticipation.

Exhilaration.

Capitulation.

For in the past, it was English that capitulated to French.

In Chaucer’s Prologue to The Canterbury Tales, the Prioress is ridiculed for speaking bastardized French: He slips into Chaucerian English.

“And French she spake full faire and fetisly, After the school of Stratford-at-Bow, For French of Paris was to her unknow.”

He shakes the test papers.

What was this French from “the school of Stratford-at-Bow?” Not a distant cry from what you have here, my impish urchins, your Level One French of Western New York. Your Level One French of this Heart-of-Darkness on the Great Lakes.

Those English barbarians! Brutes! Payback for the Norman Invasion? They dog-paddled panting across the Channel. And burned down -– France. For one hundred years. A Hundred Years’ War! That’s a grand grudge!

But a maid of Orleans appeared on the battlefield. Joan of Arc had a vision.

She had a dream. A dream of a world in which children would be judged not by the color of their flags, but by the content of their vocabulary. She had a dream. A dream that one day little French boys and little French girls would join hands with little English boys and little English girls and recite the irregular verbs of both their languages.

But like so many beautiful dreams, she went up in smoke.

The English and French were not yet worn-down from war. So westward,

they watched. They wondered. They wandered. The West. This New World. This America. This spacious sky. This fruited plain. Two empires of linguistic thought competing for amber waves of grain.

The English. Their goals: spread slavery. Promote religious intolerance.

Encourage the use of tobacco.

The French. Their goal. Simply one. The manufacture of stylish hats!

Befriend the natives. Who know the way of the beaver. With their shimmery, shiny pelts! For the manufacture of stylish hats!

Two versions of the future. A date was set for the final showdown. The Thirteenth of September, 1759. The Battle of the Plains of Abraham. The locale? In the very heart of New France, in the colony called Canada, outside the walls of Quebec City. The players? General James Wolfe in red. The Marquis de Montcalm in blue. The result? Collision. Collapse. Catastrophe.

So you speak not the French of Paris, but the English of a frozen, rusty scrap heap, a scrap heap forgotten by people who live on the other end of the highway.

And so you watch not the insightful drollery of Molière, but men in tight pants tossing an elliptical mass of cowhide.

And so you eat blue cheese, not paired with a glass of fine Bordeaux, but as a dipping sauce for chicken wings and celery sticks.

How then to communicate with you? As that is my duty. My vocation.

My contribution to society.

From Beautiful Province (Belle Province)

received the 2012 Yale Drama Series Prize for Beautiful Province (Belle Province). His honors include a Rita Goldberg Fellowship at The Lark, a Dramatists Guild Fellowship, and a 2016 NYFA Fellowship. He received his MFA in Playwriting at Columbia University. He is a resident playwright at New Dramatists and a member of the Ma-Yi Writers Lab. He lives in New York, where he is the manager of academic administration of Columbia’s MFA Writing Program.

CLARENCE COO

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FICTION

ge d i een r nG y l it Ka

Dr. Paulsen unlocked the door and we filed behind her into the front room. Our boxes had already been delivered and they were piled in towers all around us, but the furniture belonged to the Toneybee Institute.

We’d sold all of ours back in Dorchester. “They’re giving us brand-new furniture,” my mother had crowed. “Can you imagine?”

The couch in the front room was just as saggy and broken down as the one we’d had in Boston. There were also a few wooden end tables that looked rich: dark wood carved with heavy curlicues. But when I stood beside one, I saw that the flourishes were nicked and the tops of the tables were scarred and printed with an infinity of fading water rings. I leaned against the table and it tottered slightly back and forth.

One back leg was shorter than the others.

Callie ran ahead of us, deeper into the apartment, throwing doors open as she went. I was slower, making a show of being unimpressed.

I trailed my fingers over the freshly painted walls, pressed on the glass in the windowpanes. Behind me, I could hear my mother and Dr. Paulsen. Dr. Paulsen murmured something very low and my mother’s answer back was quick and light and clattering, her new voice here, overly bright.

They’d decided something. My mother called to me and my father, “Dr. Paulsen thinks it’s best we all meet Charlie now.”

Charlie lived behind a door in the living room. He had a large, ovalshaped space with low ceilings and no windows and no furniture.

Instead, there were bundles of pastel-colored blankets heaped up on the scarred wooden floor. Even from where I stood, I could tell the blankets were the scratchy kind, cheap wool. The room was full of plants — house ferns and weak African violets and nodding painted ladies.

“They’re here to simulate the natural world,” Dr. Paulsen told us, but I thought it was an empty gesture. Charlie had never known any forest and yet Dr. Paulsen assumed some essential part of him pined for them.

Charlie sat beside a fern. A man knelt beside him. “That’s Max, my assistant,” Dr. Paulsen said.

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Max was wearing jeans and a red T-shirt, his lab coat balled up on the floor. He was pale, with messy red hair. He was trying to grow a beard, probably just graduated from college a couple years earlier.

In front of us now, Charlie had gotten hold of Max’s glasses and was methodically pressing his tongue against each lens. Max tried to coax the glasses away, but every time he got close, Charlie only bent forward and licked him, too, all the while looking Max in his small brown eyes. Max broke some of the leaves off the fern, ran them around Charlie’s ears and under his chin, distracting him.

“They’re playing,” Dr. Paulsen explained.

But it seemed more like a very gentle disagreement. Charlie shook his head at the leaves but stayed doggedly focused on tonguing Max’s glasses.

“Max,” Dr. Paulsen called, and he squinted and waved. He picked up Charlie and brought him to us.

As he came closer, Charlie let the glasses hang loose in his hands, and he craned his neck toward Dr. Paulsen. Now he looked like a baby.

Taped around his waist was a disposable diaper. A few of his stray hairs were caught in the tape’s glue, and he kept dipping his fingers under the rough plastic hem, trying to worry them loose.

My father went to him first. He gently rubbed the top of Charlie’s head, not wanting to scare him. Charlie flinched and my father moved away. Next came Callie, who smiled and smiled, trying to get Charlie to bare his teeth back, but he wouldn’t do it. Then it was my turn.

I reached out my hand to touch him. I thought he would be bristly and sharp, like a cat, but his hair was fine, so soft it was almost unbearable. I could feel, at its downy ends, the heat spreading up from his skin beneath. I pulled my hand away quickly. The scent of him stayed on my fingers, old and sharp, like a bottle of witch hazel.

Charlie yawned. His breath was rancid, like dried, spoiled milk.

Later, when he got used to us, he would run his lips up and down our hands so that all of our skin, too, smelled like Charlie’s mouth and the hefty, mournful scent of wild animal.

My mother was the last to hold him. She was crying and she said through her tears, her hands shaking as she reached out to touch him, “Isn’t he beautiful?”

I wanted to say something snide. I wanted to say what I had been telling her since she told us about this experiment: that this was crazy, that she was crazy, that it would never work. I wanted to sign bullshit.

But I looked into my mother’s face, wet and wide open with joy, and I couldn’t help myself.

“Yes,” I told her, “he’s beautiful.”

From We Love You, Charlie Freeman

was born in Boston and received her MFA from Hunter College. Her work has appeared in The Believer, American Short Fiction, Guernica, Kweli Journal, The Feminist Wire, and others. She is the recipient of fellowships from Lower Manhattan Community Council’s Workspace Program and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, among other prizes. Her novel, We Love You, Charlie Freeman, was published by Algonquin in 2016. She lives in Brooklyn.

KAITLYN GREENIDGE

30

FICTION

ay d i all H a Lis

It was still four-four in the bottom of the ninth when he muted a Viagra ad and swiveled brightly to face her. “Darling, in the cooler in the back of the deli here on the corner they have Häagen Dazs bars. Do you want one?”

“Now?” “Sure. You’ll be right back. But listen. I want vanilla on the inside, chocolate on the outside, nuts. If they don’t have that I want chocolate on the inside, chocolate on the outside, no nuts. And if they don’t have that I want vanilla on the inside, chocolate on the outside, no nuts. Plus whatever you want, darling. My wallet’s right on the table there. Go!” At the deli they only had raspberry. And in the convenience store one block up they had only chocolate on the inside, chocolate on the outside, nuts. Alice picked one up and stared at it for a faintly agonizing moment — it wasn’t even the right brand — before putting it back again and running the long block over to Amsterdam, where, in the narrow all-sorts shop that sold pornography next to Caramel Creams, she found, in the back, a freezer stocked almost exclusively with vanilla on the inside, chocolate on the outside, nuts.

“Sí!”

The cashier was eating takeout and watching a television stashed under the counter. “What happened?” Alice asked.

“Ortiz struck out.” Fork aloft, he continued watching for a moment before lifting his free hand to take Ezra’s money; when at last he looked up and saw the B on Alice’s hat he inhaled sharply. “Ah, la enemiga.”

“Where have you been?” Ezra asked her when she got back.

In the twelfth inning, Ortiz tried to steal second but was called out after Jeter, legs spread, sprung vertically into the air to catch a high throw from Posada. He snagged it, and, after seeming to hang in space for an impossibly long moment, returned to the ground and tagged Papi on the back.

“My God,” said Ezra, pointing his ice cream stick at the screen.

“For a moment I thought I was watching Nijinsky.”

32

“Ugh. I can’t stand him. Look how smug he looks.”

“Remember when we used to have sex, Mary-Alice?”

“He was safe!”

“No he wasn’t, darling.”

“Yes he was!”

In the thirteenth, Varitek dropped three knuckleballs, letting Yankees advance to second and third. Alice groaned. Another sign went up in the stands: BELIEVE. “In what?” said Ezra. “The Tooth Fairy?”

With two outs in the bottom of the fourteenth, Ortiz fouled right, then left, plus two more fouls up and over the backstop, then hit a fair ball that dropped down in centerfield, driving Johnny Damon home.

“Hoooraaaaaaaayy!”

“All right, Choo. That’s it. Time for bed.”

“Uh, Mary-Alice,” he said to her voicemail the following morning, less than an hour after she’d left. “I’m sorry to ask you this, but before you come over here this evening — I assume you are coming over here this evening — would you mind first going to Zabar’s and picking up some applesauce? The chunky kind? I’ll pay you back.” His voice sounded flat and irritable, drained of the previous evening’s garrulousness, and when Alice arrived after an emergency e-book meeting that had run the full length of the afternoon he was holding his back, pacing and grimacing again, the television on mute and an electric heating pad warming the empty seat of his chair. As quietly as she could she put the applesauce into the refrigerator, got a tumbler down from the cupboard, and unwound the wax on a new bottle of Knob Creek. CALL MEL RE: WILL read a Post-it note stuck to the counter. A second note next to it read Q-TIPS!!! Even the way this looked in his incontrovertible hand made her feel a fool for ever thinking she could write. When she looked up again he was in his chair, neck stoically erect, the back of his head like a wax copy of itself if not for its infinitesimal pulsing.

She carried her drink to the bed and lay across it. In the flickering silence they watched the pre-game graphics as intently as if any moment now their own life expectancies would be posted there. GAME 3: LONGEST 9 INN. GAME IN POSTSEASON HISTORY (4:20). GAME 5: LONGEST GAME IN POSTSEASON HISTORY (5:49). 21 HOURS,

46 MINUTES TOTAL OF 1ST 5 GAMES. 1,864 PITCHES. Alice memorized each lineup, briefly contemplated life in the Dominican Republic, and wondered about dinner. Her instinct, as ever, if not innate then informed by old childhood fears, was to ride out and perhaps even allay such moods by being as still and quiet as possible. But the bourbon had different ideas.

“I love that color,” she said, when the screen cut to a wide shot of Yankee Stadium with its grass mown into stripes that were actually two slightly different shades of emerald.

A long moment later, Ezra replied in a low and even voice: “Yes. Night-game green.”

When Jon Lieber took to the mound, Alice got up again to refresh her drink. “Would it be all right if we turned the sound on now?”

It was too loud, as though the night before they’d been watching with a dozen friends all laughing and chatting at once, and one of the announcers had a slight Southern accent that sounded almost stoned in its serenity, the other a rich, reassuring baritone not dissimilar to the one that narrated the Viagra ads. Babbling away about the bullpen, Curt Schilling’s tendon, and the “difficult conditions” presented by the weather, their voices filled the little room like disembodied dinner guests trying to ignore the tension mounting between their hosts.

Forecast: Drizzle. Wind speed: 14MPH, left to right. Superimposed against the misty skyline, her and Ezra’s reflections in the yellow glow of his reading lamp had the trapped and inanimate look of dollhouse detainees. Alone together, together alone... Except of course they weren’t alone. Ezra’s pain was with them. Ezra, his pain, and Alice, barely tolerable envoy from the enraging world of the healthy.

From Asymmetry

LISA HALLIDAY ’s work has appeared in The Paris Review . She previously worked at The Wylie Agency and is a freelance editor and translator in Milan. Her novel, Asymmetry, will be published by Simon and Schuster in 2018.

34

DRAM A

es m Ja

es m Ija

(Music. Lights. The room suddenly becomes something of a vodun ceremony. Dancing that spins through the space. The Chorus becomes possessed. Martha rushes back to her bed. First moment of Real Terror.

Red streaks of light flash across the room. The sound and frenzy build to a climax. Martha hides below the covers. Big finish! Silence. The Chorus disappears. A few seconds later, Martha emerges from beneath the covers. Sitting at a desk we see MR. LAWYER MAN. He is dressed in contemporary suit. He is looking over stacks and stacks of files.)

MR. LAWYER MAN

Mr. Lawyer Man. (clipped) Evening.

It’s a huge honor. I’m a big fan. You look great.

MARTHA

...Thank you...but you’re... (whispering) You’re a negra.

MR. LAWYER MAN

Yes. MARTHA

So you can’t be a lawyer- MR. LAWYER MAN

--Weeeeeeeeeeell technically- MARTHA

MARTHA

Would you please get out of my bedroom?

Sucky Boy? MR. LAWYER MAN

No Ma’am.

I have been hired to come and help you with the state of your estate.

MARTHA

MARTHA

Who are you?

But I’m not dead.

MR. LAWYER MAN

MR. LAWYER MAN

That is inconvenient, isn’t it. Now...it is my advice to you...as legal counsel for the deceased, one Mister...(checks his files) George Washington. That you, being his most direct benefactor, should with all deliberate speed and effectiveness, free the slaves that have been, from the moment of his death, under your charge and care. Ab Initio of the activation of Mr. Washington’s Last Will and Testament, the circumstances of the living property of Mount Vernon have (searches for the best word) shifted.

Washington. The slaves’ awareness of the circumstances surrounding their future emancipation has created a heightened state of hostility between the aforementioned Mrs. Washington and said slaves.

MARTHA

You’re good! What does all of that mean?

MR. LAWYER MAN

Ipso facto...get rid of ’em fo they get rid of you?

MARTHA

MARTHA

What?!

That’s the advice!?

MR. LAWYER MAN

MR. LAWYER MAN

Henceforth and such and such, it would serve the de facto slaveholder, uh that’s you, Mrs. Washington, to be rid of the slaves the aforementioned slaveholder is currently keeping, clothing, and feeding. Shelter is running out, as Mount Vernon has accommodations for no more than one hundred and sixty slaves, give or take the baby in the dresser drawer upstairs. I have done an extensive review of the plantation’s assets.

In addition to the aforementioned expense of said slaves, I give a further caution. I am concerned about the protection and well being of the slaveholder in the absentia of Mr.

Well yes.

MARTHA

No. MR. LAWYER MAN

Great so...wait...No? MARTHA

That’s right.

MR. LAWYER MAN

But uh- MARTHA

(matter-of-factly) --That’s the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard. Do you suggest that

36

MR. LAWYER MAN

MR. LAWYER MAN Old Uncle Ned is old. He’s older than you in fact and yet...he manages to make his own breakfast eeeeeeeeeeevery morning and pick his own tobacco eeeeeeeeeeevry day. And bring you breakfast eeeeeeeeeeevery day. Doesn’t it seem strange to you that you can’t do the same...seems strange, Martha...seems strange.

You really think you need two hundred slaves to take care of you?

MARTHA

I take to plowing fields and washing floors as well? Who’s going to take care of me?!

(Mr. Lawyer Man stares blankly at her. “Is she serious?”)

MARTHA

Why are you looking at me like that?

MARTHA

Yes. MR. LAWYER MAN

Well, as your lawyer I suggest- MARTHA

--George! He sent you! Where is he?

If memory serves me correctly, George didn’t seem to mind Ned shining his boots.

MR. LAWYER MAN I’m not at liberty to discuss Mr. Washington’s morals. But...can’t a man change his mind? Can’t a man see the error of his ways? Hindsight, Martha. Hindsight!

MR. LAWYER MAN

Mr. Washington is currently indisposed.

MARTHA You expect me to free them...all of them?

MARTHA

INDISPOSED!

(Mr. Lawyer Man checks his file… beat.)

MR. LAWYER MAN

Easy now.

MR. LAWYER MAN Yes, that would be correct.

MARTHA

Well! I never! In all my...How am I supposed to function without slaves?

I’m an old woman.

MARTHA

I don’t know. Why didn’t he do this when he was alive?

MR. LAWYER MAN It seems Mr. Washington required a large support infrastructure. Running a new nation and all- MARTHA --No really. Now that it’s just me it’s a splendid idea. Do I have that right?

MR. LAWYER MAN Do the right thing, Martha.

MARTHA

I quite like my life. I think I shall keep it exactly the way it is.

MR. LAWYER MAN Do you think that’s...wise.

...Yes...

MARTHA

MR. LAWYER MAN

Your call. Oh! Will you look at the time. I have to scoot...

MARTHA Where are you going...you...just got here. Don’t you want to...stay a while?

No can do.

is a Philadelphia-based actor and playwright. A founding member of Orbiter 3 Playwright Producing Collective, a member of the InterAct Core Writers Group, and a mentor for The Foundry, he is a recipient of the F. Otto Haas Award for an Emerging Artist, the Terrence McNally New Play Award for WHITE, and the 2015 Kesselring Honorable Mention Prize for The Most Spectacularly Lamentable Trial of Miz Martha Washington. He is an Independence Foundation Fellow and a 2015 Pew Fellow. He received a BA in Drama from Morehouse College and a MFA in Acting from Temple University, and is Assistant Professor of Theatre at Villanova University. He lives in South Philadelphia.

JAMES IJAMES

MR. LAWYER MAN

From The Most Spectacularly Lamentable Trial of Miz Martha Washington

38

FICTION

tte u im h t ula T ny To

Roopa stood at the stove in a capital R, a hand bracing her tailbone and one leg stretched back, with her waxy black hair tressing down like a stripe of brushed pitch, ending in a horizontal slash at midwaist.

Her face was babyish and marsupial-thin. She wasn’t ravishing, but she wasn’t unattractive, but men definitely treated her as if she were ravishing. She wore a blue apron over a brown dress with the sleeves ripped off. Cast-iron pans and stew pots were stationed over all four burners.

“Oh, you should’ve told me you were home, I would’ve made more,” Roopa said. “It’s potato hash with fennel and rosemary and Niman Ranch bacon and tempeh. And TVP.” “It’s okay, thanks,” Cory said.

“I found chèvre too. The Trader Joe’s ones are ginormous. And they throw it out fully wrapped. Think how many landfill acres are taken up just by airtight cheese. Sure you don’t want any?”

“Yeah, no, I’m good.”

“Really? You sure?”

“Thanks, I’m fine.”

Cory opened the refrigerator. It was a maddening presence— always on, drawing an eighth of their electricity, just to store food. It carried a permanent stench of chilled compost and was crammed with communal groceries; Cory spent an eternity rearranging items to get to her week-old bok choy stir-fry leftovers. It was greasy, awfully greasy.

She could do radishes and hummus for fiber, soy milk for protein, liquid amino for more protein. She took out the hummus and the soy milk and put the hummus back in and borrowed a nectarine from Jinnie’s shelf, and then took the hummus out again, jogging it in her hands to ponder its mass, its lipids and carbs, though she already knew all the numbers to the tenth decimal. Also she’d heard this particular hummus had done something bad to Palestine. Her hunger stabbed her; she tossed the hummus back in the fridge and took out her Tupperware of stir-fry.

She just wouldn’t eat the whole thing.

“That’s your dinner?” Roopa said, in that sympathetic/annoyed tone you used with confused foreign tourists. “Where’s the flavor?

Aren’t you at least going to heat it up and plate it?”

“Nah.” Roopa turned to the stove and mounded a plate with a few hundred thousand calories of glistening tempeh. The odor made Cory’s saliva salty. “Try this. It’s yummy and it’s totally sanitary. Nom nom.”

“Thanks, Roop, but I gotta eat this—” “Before it goes bad? That’s so depressing. It probably doesn’t even have any nutrients after all that refrigeration. Try my food. I know it seems gross to eat ‘garbage,’ but people have to get over that.”

Cory laid her things on the kitchen counter. When she had first moved to the city, the plan had been to recruit kindred progressives into the warehouse, maybe becoming one of those Bay Area cultural polestars. She first met Roopa at Socialize’s garden harvest potluck three months ago, and, spotting a potential girlfriend or roommate or both, Cory had approached Roopa and smoked her out. As Cory wondered how to broach Roopa’s sexual and political alignments, Roopa was already headed straight for those topics: two years at Oberlin as a sexual health advisor who practiced what she preached, a year in South America for her anthropology thesis (“Recuperating Presence: The Immediacy of Indigene Consciousness”—in lieu of Eurocentric written documents, she’d produced photo-graphs and small beaded weavings).

Then she’d dropped out for culinary school in Boston, dropping out again to couch-surf California.

In Cory’s stoned brain, Roopa had seemed ideal, and they moved her in ASAP. But it turned out they weren’t equally political, just equally pedantic. At first Cory had been thrilled that Roopa attended Socialize events, but Roopa would keep offering unsolicited advice (“I still think marriage equality isn’t the issue. We need to abolish marriage”). In turn, Roopa brought Cory to her anarchist “salons”—usually potlucks or homebrewed pickle tastings at other collectives, where discussions played on conspiratorial themes: 9/11 was an inside job, canned tomatoes caused Parkinson’s, etc. An urban primitive with pepperoni-size ear gauges wondered aloud if heterosexual intercourse was “inherently degrading.” Cory got through it only by pretending she was conducting an anthropological study of failed radicalism. Roopa understood

40

Cory’s lack of enthusiasm as liberal wimpiness, which she liked taking potshots at, like now.

“I think,” Cory said, “we can divest from industrial monoculture instead of relying on its waste. You know how they say benefit is complicity.”

“The real waste would be to let food spoil for an empty gesture.”

“Couldn’t we put community pressure on supermarkets to reduce waste in the first place?”

“The fact is”—Roopa sucked a crumb that had fallen on her apron— “that the waste is there now, and it supports indigent communities.”

“Well, you’re right about that. Is it really okay for people like us to take free food we don’t need?”

“There’s plenty for everyone. Also, I’m not exactly well-off.” Roopa laughed. “I’d starve if I didn’t hit the Dumpsters. It’s not like I’m exploiting food stamps. I’m part of the working poor.”

Somehow Roopa got by, part-time and under the table, freelancing as a food photographer and botanical illustrator. Cory didn’t want to have to explain the distinction between poor and broke. Spurning the nine-to-five was fine, but Cory suspected Roopa’s work ethic was rooted in a determination to feel good about feeling good. Still, it was baffling how Roopa could afford San Francisco on freelance wages. Cory did take food stamps.

“I think you just get off on guilt,” Roopa said, closing her eyes and making cumming noises as she forked up a mouthful of hash and worked it around in her mouth without chewing.

Cory’s eyelids glitched. “I wasn’t saying Dumpster-diving is immoral. I was only thinking maybe it’d be best not to create a social institution dependent on corporate excess.”

“We’re redeeming the waste. It’s putting ideals into action on the most basic level.”

“Spending half a day making dinner, that’s ‘action’?”

“That’s the role food should play in people’s lives. Food is culture, just like songs and paintings. I’ve had meals that made me cry. Some people are visual, others are tactile, and actually I’m a synesthete so I’m kinda both, but I also get so much meaning in through my mouth.”

But so painfully little out from her mouth . . . “Well, air is important too. Should we spend hours every day working on breathing?”

“Doy. Ever heard of yoga? I’m only sort of kidding.”

Cory wouldn’t win. Roopa was rigid, the way free spirits often were, about the romance of naturopathy and well-being as morality.

Photographing meals, food blogging, recreational fasting—all that time committed to sweeping the steps of her temple. It was at least as disordered as what Cory had. There was this spin, this indulgent spin to Roopa’s charity: when she did relief in Chile, she returned with a copper-goddess tan; if she volunteered for a bake sale, it was because she enjoyed baking.

Her diet was another slick win-win rationalization of glut. Good intentions notwithstanding, that was the lemon-meringue heart of her frankly dipshit worldview: that merely observing selective austerities—abstaining from work, from money—was activism, when really it was shallow passivism . . .

Roopa turned off the burners and unlaced her apron. She never looked tired. “Honestly,” Roopa said, “people who shop in supermarkets should be forced to spend a day in a cage, like factory chickens.

And those of us who didn’t go to Stanford don’t have the option to buy bougie farmer’s market greens.”

Like Cory was so rich! As if she lorded her diploma around! She hated that no matter what she did, her achievements redounded to a massively endowed, for-profit corporation—Stanford, Inc. But complaining about this would make her seem even more stuck-up. “Yeah, okay, Roopa? First of all, you went to Oberlin. Second, I’m just as broke as you, and my degree means nothing in the nonprofit world—well, I know privilege is invisible, but . . .” Cory pressed a thumb to her temple, where an éclat of migraine was about to light up a deep furrow of her brain. “Look, we both hate consumer waste. I prefer a policy approach, and you—well, you tell me.”

Roopa leaned in and seized Cory’s hand. Cory hated rhetorical touching. “All politics are spiritual issues first,” Roopa said.

From Private Citizens

is a graduate of Stanford University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, VICE, N+1, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. His work has received an O. Henry Award and a MacDowell Fellowship. Private Citizens was published by William Morrow in 2016, and was named a best book of the year by The New Yorker, The Guardian, The Atlantic, and Buzzfeed, among others. He lives in Brooklyn.

TONY TULATHIMUTTE

42

POETRY

ite h W ne o Sim

Then I began to hear the call of Los Angeles.

The best rooms in the apartment faced North.

My husband tried to put me where I could entertain winter light, the lavender paint-idea, the sectional porn poured in from design blogs. Well, it was no use. Los Angeles was on my face; it was hot and harmless.

Before I burned up and rolled away, black-ass tumbleweed, as had happened so many times in dreams that year, it was important that I get there or get some information my papa was trying to get across, like, GO TO LOS ANGELES (where dead negroes can’t get in your house).

Yeah.

It has been suggested that I am insufficiently open to the possible presence of occult phenomena on this earth. Voices of the dead, which I just told you come around/irritate me, rock kinetics, shamans and people who clear auras, I do not deal in. Not because they are not real, but because they are, I do not deal in them.

Los Angeles of the hidden garden, of the carved-up starlet, acres of strange dick, items of unclear provenance and arbitrary value.

There is a hotel in West Hollywood, quite near the bungalow of an old friend who can make shoes out of wood and boiled wool, but that is just an example of what she can do. I would like to take a room in this hotel for weeks on end and pretend to be dead. I should drink champagne and refuse help, then move to another hotel. Perhaps, the Beverly Hills.

44

From “Lotion” Lotion is a palliative. What does it correct? It corrects ash. What is ashiness? Ash is a gray track of evident decay, most striking in contrast with darker skins, brown skins, tending to black.

After bathing, I apply both face and body lotions. After handwashing, hand lotion. In the winter, I apply an extra layer of thick oily cream, too oily for the hands (but good for the thin skin on the shins that cracks in cold, dry weather) to my heels and elbows. Sometimes I notice a black woman unknown to me, not homeless, whose legs or feet or hands are so ashy that I wonder whether she has lost her mind.

Liniments are a second class of lotions, meant to address a deeper set of problems.

I find myself on my knees with some rags and a bucket filled with scalding hot soapy water and bleach. My mother has visited and discovered some scuzz on the stepladder that I am obliged to use for retrieving bowls, pitchers and the like from the uppermost shelves in my apartment. I am wiping clots of greasy dirt from the rungs of this already ugly metal thing, scrubbing also the dirty bands of floor that protrude beyond spaces that “cannot be cleaned” — the edge-of-under the refrigerator, the stove, the dishwasher, the poorly

installed, cheap formica cabinets. Filth. On my knees now, I perform an act of penitence; in that this dirt has been discovered and named and pointed to, I am humiliated; in that suggestions have been made regarding the method of its eradication, too, I am humiliated. Over the telephone, my mother insists that I kneel, of course, on some towels or sheets, folded several times to protect my knees from being scratched or scraped, made dark or scaly from work. “Are you wearing gloves?” she asks. “You wouldn’t want to get an infection. It’s how your father almost lost his arm. They made him scrub the floors.” My father had osteomyelitis as a teenager. A serious infection led to several botched surgeries, all performed while he was locked up in a facility for juveniles somewhere outside Philadelphia. In fights, he used his casts as weapons and never recovered the full use of his scarred right arm and hand. I never knew that, about the floors, I tell my mother, sloshing a rag around in the putrid bucket.

Our crooked fingers are soft, soft, all my parents’ children.

I maintain dominion over the crevices of myself, deep into the layers of my skin, which must never be questioned. Never doubt that these crevices extend toward an infinitely receding boundary. Come close to me to feel it.

is the author of Of Being Dispersed (Futurepoem Books, 2016), Unrest (Ugly Duckling Presse/Dossier Series, 2013), House Envy of All the World (Factory School/Heretical Texts, 2010) and the collaborative poem/painting chapbook Dolly, with Kim Thomas (Q Avenue Press, 2008). Dear Angel of Death, a book of criticism and poems, will be published by Ugly Duckling Presse in 2017.

Simone is a Cave Canem fellow and was selected as a New American Poet for the Poetry Society of America in 2013. She is Program Director at The Poetry Project and Visiting Assistant Professor of Literary Studies at The New School, Eugene Lang College. She lives in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.

SIMONE WHITE

46

POETRY

ms a i ill W B. p i ill Ph

“Black Witch Moth” The moth lifts its dress and everything beneath its hem’s shadow sings—the grasses where lie the dead bull and flies skating across its stillopen eyes, its mouth crusted over with clover and spit while the maggots swim their patient circuits where the bull’s genitals have rotted and dropped their bells. The moth slips through gnat-swarmed air onto the bull’s hooves and flies past the bull’s corpse, beyond the outskirts of the barnyard. No dust from the moth’s pleats— opening and closing—drops onto the dead animal’s choir. A boy sees its black dress bob above him, sees in its shadow an angel to call his own.

Let a sudden finish overcome him wherever the wild shadow lies flat its news, lies motionless its wingdom among the barnyard grass.

Let the earth take in the boy as it will the bull.

And the worm-work done unto him as unto the bull.

His color gone and bone given into an end making permanent the final pose of his suffering, crux into crux his body returning into itself as though into the first cell that split until skin, until marrow, until muscle, until the maggot is king over body. Let the boy’s skin be a tearing, to see it torn from him and wonder how then wonder how far until the next time, the next boy.

The moth flashes open its dress then not, flash then not, flaps over the dead boy, its shadow moving up his thigh to the hip, to the torso, lifting its garment across his nakedness.

And the bull into the earth. And the boy into the earth.

And the earth not full, the earth not full.

48

“Do-rag” O darling, the moon did not disrobe you.

You fell asleep that way, nude and capsized by our wine, our bump n’ grind shenanigans. Blame it on whatever you like; my bed welcomes whomever you decide to be: hungmistress, bride’s bouquet, John Doe in the alcove of my dreams. You can quote verbatim an entire album of Bone Thugs-N-Harmony with your ass in the air. There’s nothing wrong with that. They mince syllables as you call me yours. You don’t like me but still invite me to your home when your homies aren’t near enough to hear us crash into each other like hours. Some men have killed their lovers because they loved them

so much in secret that the secret kept coming out: wife gouging her husband with suspicion, churches sneering when an usher enters. Never mind that.

The sickle moon turns the sky into a man’s mouth slapped sideways to keep him from spilling what no one would understand: you call me god when it gets good though I do not exist to you outside this room. Be yourself or no one else here. Your do-rag is camouflage-patterned and stuffed into my mouth.

is the author of Thief in the Interior, a finalist for an NAACP Image Award, and winner of the 2017 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. He received a 2013 Ruth Lilly Fellowship and is the co-editor-in-chief of the online journal Vinyl.

He is currently visiting professor in English at Bennington College. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

PHILLIP B. WILLIAMS

50

e ers h d r T inn a w W the g A of hitin 017 W 85–2 19

Raymond Abbott, Fiction, 1985

Don Mee Choi, Poetry, 2011

André Aciman, Fiction, 1995

Paul Clemens, Nonfiction, 2011

David Adjmi, Drama, 2010

Robert Cohen, Fiction, 2000

Ellen Akins, Fiction, 1989

Christopher Cokinos, Nonfiction, 2003

Daniel Alarcón, Fiction, 2004

Clarence Coo, Drama, 2017

Jeffery Renard Allen, Fiction,

Amanda Coplin, Fiction, 2013

Poetry, 2002

Leopoldine Core, Fiction, 2015

Mindy Aloff, Nonfiction, 1987

Eduardo C. Corral, Poetry, 2011

Elizabeth Arnold, Poetry, 2002

Mark Cox, Poetry, 1987

John Ash, Poetry, 1986

Douglas Crase, Poetry, 1985

Kirsten Bakis, Fiction, 2004

Justin Cronin, Fiction, 2002

Catherine Barnett, Poetry, 2004

Stanley Crouch, Nonfiction, 1991

Clare Barron, Drama, 2017

Michael Cunningham, Fiction, 1995

Elif Batuman, Nonfiction, 2010

Michael Dahlie, Fiction, 2010

Jen Beagin, Fiction, 2017

Charles D’Ambrosio, Fiction, 2006

Jo Ann Beard, Nonfiction, 1997

J. D. Daniels, Nonfiction, 2016

Mischa Berlinski, Fiction, 2008

Lydia Davis, Fiction, 1988

Ciaran Berry, Poetry, 2012

Connie Deanovich, Poetry, 1997

Sherwin Bitsui, Poetry, 2006

Hannah Dela Cruz Abrams, Fiction,

Scott Blackwood, Fiction, 2011

Nonfiction, 2013

Brian Blanchfield, Nonfiction, 2016

LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, Poetry, 2016

Judy Blunt, Nonfiction, 2001

Trudy Dittmar, Nonfiction, 2003

Courtney A. Brkic, Fiction, 2003

Matt Donovan, Poetry, 2010

Joel Brouwer, Poetry, 2001

Mark Doty, Poetry, 1994

Jericho Brown, Poetry, 2009

Jennifer Dubois, Fiction, 2013

Michael Burkard, Poetry, 1988

Bruce Duffy, Fiction, 1988

Michael Byers, Fiction, 1998

Pam Durban, Fiction, 1987

Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum, Fiction, 2005

Stuart Dybek, Fiction, 1985

Ryan Call, Fiction, 2011

Gerald Early, Nonfiction, 1988

Sheila Callaghan, Drama, 2007

Russell Edson, Poetry, 1989

Francisco Cantú, Nonfiction, 2017

Kim Edwards, Fiction, 2002

Anthony Carelli, Poetry, 2015

Louis Edwards, Fiction, 1994

Hayden Carruth, Poetry, 1986

Erik Ehn, Drama, 1997

Emily Carter, Fiction, 2001

Gretel Ehrlich, Nonfiction, 1987

Joan Chase, Fiction, 1987

Nancy Eimers, Poetry, 1998

Alexander Chee, Fiction, 2003

Deborah Eisenberg, Fiction, 1987

Dan Chiasson, Poetry, 2004

Thomas Sayers Ellis, Poetry, 2005

52

Jeffrey Eugenides, Fiction, 1993

Michael Haskell, Poetry, 1999

Roger Fanning, Poetry, 1992

Ehud Havazelet, Fiction, 1999

Anderson Ferrell, Fiction, 1996

Terrance Hayes, Poetry, 1999

Kathleen Finneran, Nonfiction, 2001

Alan Heathcock, Fiction, 2012

Ben Fountain, Fiction, 2007

Amy Herzog, Drama, 2011

Jonathan Franzen, Fiction, 1988

Emily Hiestand, Poetry, 1990

Kennedy Fraser, Nonfiction, 1994

Rick Hilles, Poetry, 2008

Ian Frazier, Nonfiction, 1989

Lucas Hnath, Drama, 2015

Nell Freudenberger, Fiction, 2005

Eva Hoffman, Nonfiction, 1992

Forrest Gander, Poetry, 1997

Donovan Hohn, Nonfiction, 2008

Cristina García, Fiction, 1996

John Holman, Fiction, 1991

Madeleine George, Drama, 2016

Mary Hood, Fiction, 1994

David Gewanter, Poetry, 2002

Jay Hopler, Poetry, 2009

Melissa James Gibson, Drama, 2002

Michelle Huneven, Fiction, 2002

Dagoberto Gilb, Fiction, 1993

Samuel D. Hunter, Drama, 2012

Samantha Gillison, Fiction, 2000

Ishion Hutchinson, Poetry, 2013

Aracelis Girmay, Poetry, 2015

Naomi Iizuka, Drama, 1999

Jody Gladding, Poetry, 1997

James Ijames, Drama, 2017

Allison Glock, Nonfiction, 2004

Major Jackson, Poetry, 2003

Molly Gloss, Fiction, 1996

Mitchell S. Jackson, Fiction, 2016

Rebecca Goldstein, Fiction, 1991

Tyehimba Jess, Poetry, 2006

Allegra Goodman, Fiction, 1991

Adam Johnson, Fiction, 2009

Jorie Graham, Poetry, 1985

Denis Johnson, Fiction, 1986

Lucy Grealy, Nonfiction, Poetry, 1995

Jenny Johnson, Poetry, 2015

Elana Greenfield, Drama, Fiction, 2004

R. S. Jones, Fiction, 1992

Kaitlyn Greenidge, Fiction, 2017

A. Van Jordan, Poetry, 2004

Linda Gregg, Poetry, 1985

Dan Josefson, Fiction, 2015

Gordon Grice, Nonfiction, 1999

Rajiv Joseph, Drama, 2009

Virginia Grise, Drama, 2013

Cynthia Kadohata, Fiction, 1991

Rinne Groff, Drama, 2005

Agymah Kamau, Fiction, 2003

Paul Guest, Poetry, 2007

Ilya Kaminsky, Poetry, 2005

Stephen Adly Guirgis, Drama, 2006

Joan Kane, Poetry, 2009

Danai Gurira, Drama, 2012

Seth Kantner, Fiction, 2005

Daniel Hall, Poetry, 1998

Mary Karr, Poetry, 1989

Lisa Halliday, Fiction, 2017

Douglas Kearney, Poetry, 2008

W. David Hancock, Drama, 1998

John Keene, Fiction, Poetry, 2005

Kent Haruf, Fiction, 1986

Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Poetry, 1996

Randall Kenan, Fiction, Nonfiction, 1994

Shane McCrae, Poetry, 2011

Brad Kessler, Fiction, 2007

Tarell Alvin McCraney, Drama, 2007

Laleh Khadivi, Fiction, 2008

Alice McDermott, Fiction, 1987

Alice Sola Kim, Fiction, 2016

Reginald McKnight, Fiction, 1995

Suji Kwock Kim, Poetry, 2006

John McManus, Fiction, 2000

James Kimbrell, Poetry, 1998

James McMichael, Poetry, 1995

Lily King, Fiction, 2000

Scott McPherson, Drama, 1991

Brian Kiteley, Fiction, 1996

Jane Mead, Poetry, 1992

Matthew Klam, Fiction, 2001

Suketu Mehta, Fiction, Nonfiction, 1997

Kevin Kling, Drama, 1993

Morgan Meis, Nonfiction, 2013

Wayne Koestenbaum, Nonfiction,

Ellen Meloy, Nonfiction, 1997

Poetry, 1994

Michael Meyer, Nonfiction, 2009

Tony Kushner, Drama, 1990

Meg Miroshnik, Drama, 2012

Natalie Kusz, Nonfiction, 1989

Albert Mobilio, Fiction, Poetry, 2000

Catherine Lacey, Fiction, 2016

C. E. Morgan, Fiction, 2013

Mary La Chapelle, Fiction, 1988

Wright Morris, Fiction, Nonfiction, 1985

Rattawut Lapcharoensap, Fiction, 2010

Sylvia Moss, Poetry, 1988

Victor Lavalle, Fiction, 2004

Thylias Moss, Poetry, 1991

Amy Leach, Nonfiction, 2010

Brighde Mullins, Drama, 2001

Li-Young Lee, Poetry, 1988

Nami Mun, Fiction, 2009

Suzannah Lessard, Nonfiction, 1995

Manuel Muñoz, Fiction, 2008

Dana Levin, Poetry, 2005

Yannick Murphy, Fiction, 1990

Mark Levine, Poetry, 1993

Yxta Maya Murray, Fiction, 1999

Yiyun Li, Fiction, 2006

Lawrence Naumoff, Fiction, 1990

Ralph Lombreglia, Fiction,

Howard Norman, Fiction, 1985

Nonfiction, 1998

Bruce Norris, Drama, 2006

Layli Long Soldier, Poetry, 2016

Josip Novakovich, Fiction,

Nathaniel Mackey, Fiction, Poetry, 1993

Nonfiction, 1997

Rosemary Mahoney, Nonfiction, 1994

Sigrid Nunez, Fiction, 1993

Mona Mansour, Drama, 2012

Dennis Nurkse, Poetry, 1990

Micheline A. Marcom, Fiction, 2006

Geoffrey O’Brien, Nonfiction, 1988

Ben Marcus, Fiction, 1999

Chris Offutt, Fiction, Nonfiction, 1996

J. S. Marcus, Fiction, 1992

Patrick O’Keeffe, Fiction, 2006

Anthony Marra, Fiction, 2012

Dael Orlandersmith, Drama, 2008

Dionisio D. Martínez, Poetry, 1993

Daniel Orozco, Fiction, 2011

Nina Marie Martínez, Fiction, 2006

ZZ Packer, Fiction, 1999

Cate Marvin, Poetry, 2007

Ann Pancake, Fiction, 2003

54

Suzan-Lori Parks, Drama, 1992

Salvatore Scibona, Fiction, 2009

Elena Passarello, Nonfiction, 2015

Danzy Senna, Fiction, 2002

Lydia Peelle, Fiction, 2010

Anton Shammas, Fiction,

Janet Peery, Fiction, 1993

Nonfiction, 1991

Kathleen Peirce, Poetry, 1993

Akhil Sharma, Fiction, 2001

Benjamin Percy, Fiction, 2008

Lisa Shea, Fiction, 1993

Andrew X. Pham, Nonfiction, 2000

Julie Sheehan, Poetry, 2008

Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Poetry, 2013

Mona Simpson, Fiction, 1986

Claudia Roth Pierpont, Nonfiction, 1994

Safiya Sinclair, Poetry, 2016

Darryl Pinckney, Fiction,

Evan Smith, Drama, 2002

Nonfiction, 1986

Tracy K. Smith, Poetry, 2005

Katha Pollitt, Nonfiction, Poetry, 1992

Dalia Sofer, Fiction, 2007

Reinaldo Povod, Drama, 1987

Jason Sommer, Poetry, 2001

Padgett Powell, Fiction, 1986

Elizabeth Spires, Poetry, 1996

Stephanie Powell Watts, Fiction, 2013

Jane Springer, Poetry, 2010

Hanna Pylväinen, Fiction, 2012

Matthew Stadler, Fiction, 1995

Hugh Raffles, Nonfiction, 2009

James Thomas Stevens, Poetry, 2000

Keith Reddin, Drama, 1992

Frank Stewart, Poetry, 1986

Spencer Reece, Poetry, 2005

Ruth Stone, Poetry, 1986

Roger Reeves, Poetry, 2015

Patricia Storace, Nonfiction,

Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, Nonfiction, 2012

Poetry, 1996

Mark Richard, Fiction, 1990

Kelly Stuart, Drama, 2000

Atsuro Riley, Poetry, 2012

John Jeremiah Sullivan,

Harriet Ritvo, Nonfiction, 1990

Nonfiction, 2004

José Rivera, Drama, 1992

Melanie Sumner, Fiction, 1995

Lewis Robinson, Fiction, 2003

Mary Swander, Nonfiction, Poetry, 1994

James Robison, Fiction, 1985

Margaret Talbot, Nonfiction, 1999

Rick Rofihe, Fiction, 1991

Lysley Tenorio, Fiction, 2008

Carlo Rotella, Nonfiction, 2007

Clifford Thompson, Nonfiction, 2013

Jess Row, Fiction, 2003

LB Thompson, Poetry, 2010

Mary Ruefle, Poetry, 1995

Melanie Rae Thon, Fiction, 1997

Sarah Ruhl, Drama, 2003

Christopher Tilghman, Fiction, 1990

Michael Ryan, Poetry, 1987

Peter Trachtenberg, Nonfiction, 2007

Russ Rymer, Nonfiction, 1995

Vu Tran, Fiction, 2009

Luc Sante, Nonfiction, 1989

Judy Troy, Fiction, 1996

Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, Nonfiction, 2010

Tony Tulathimutte, Fiction, 2017

James Schuyler, Poetry, 1985

Jack Turner, Nonfiction, 2007

Mark Turpin, Poetry, 1997 Samrat Upadhyay, Fiction, 2001 Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, Fiction, 2015 A. J. Verdelle, Fiction, 1996 William T. Vollmann, Fiction, 1988 Ocean Vuong, Poetry, 2016 D. J. Waldie, Nonfiction, 1998 David Foster Wallace, Fiction, 1987 Anthony Walton, Nonfiction, 1998 Anne Washburn, Drama, 2015 Teddy Wayne, Fiction, 2011 Charles Harper Webb, Poetry, 1998 Kerri Webster, Poetry, 2011 Joshua Weiner, Poetry, 2002 Timberlake Wertenbaker, Drama, 1989 Kate Wheeler, Fiction, 1994 Simone White, Poetry, 2017 Colson Whitehead, Fiction, 2000 Marianne Wiggins, Fiction, 1989 Amy Wilentz, Nonfiction, 1990 Damien Wilkins, Fiction, 1992 Claude Wilkinson, Poetry, 2000 Phillip B. Williams, Poetry, 2017 Greg Williamson, Poetry, 1998 August Wilson, Drama, 1986 Tracey Scott Wilson, Drama, 2004 Tobias Wolff, Fiction, Nonfiction, 1989 John Wray, Fiction, 2001 Austin Wright, Fiction, Nonfiction, 1985 C. D. Wright, Poetry, 1989 Franz Wright, Poetry, 1991 Stephen Wright, Fiction, 1990 Martha Zweig, Poetry, 1999 No award was granted in 2014

PER MISSIO NS

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