The 2018 Whiting Awards

INTRODUCTION BY ARACELIS GIRMAY

The Ten Winners of the 2018 Whiting Awards

Anne Boyer POE TRY AND NONFICTION

Patrick Cottrell FICTION

Nathan Alan Davis DRAM A

Hansol Jung DRAM A

Rickey Laurentiis POETRY

Antoinette Nwandu DRAMA

Tommy Pico P OETRY

Brontez Purnell FIC TION

Esmé Weijun Wang NO NF ICTIO N

Weike Wang F ICTIO N

The Ten Winners of the 2018 Whiting Awards

WHITING FOUNDATION TRUSTEES

Peter Pennoyer, President

John N. Irwin III, Treasurer

Amanda Foreman

Kumar Mahadeva

Kate Douglas Torrey

Magdalena Zavalía Miguens, Secretary

TRUSTEES EMERITI

Antonia M. Grumbach

Robert M. Pennoyer

About the Whiting Foundation and Award

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, agents, critics, booksellers, artistic directors of theaters, dramaturges, 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 other 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 include the Creative Nonfiction Grant to enable the completion of deeplyresearched works in progress written for a general audience, and the Literary Magazine Prize, which celebrates the determined and devoted publications that nurture new writers. The Foundation also supports the humanities with the Public Engagement Fellowship, for faculty who are undertaking projects to infuse the humanities into public culture at the local and national level, and grants to preserve endangered cultural heritage around the world. All the programs are intended to empower fresh thought and help bring it to the audiences who need it most.

Introduction by Aracelis Girmay

When I was eight or nine I owned a violet shirt. Its collar shot up straight around my neck stiff as a crown, and when I buttoned each of its nearly translucent eyes, my eyes were always seeing them. I did not love this shirt, its hard angles and edges, but loved its eyes and my mother’s hands ironing it week after week. I also loved ballet class after school where, in the basement of St. Joseph’s Church, we chaîné turned diagonally across the floor before standing in line to turn again, stopping first to step into the rock rosin box where each one of us was the bull raking its hooves. And though I was Quiet I loved the violin, not for its sound but because it was brown and a girl like me. The music teacher said “Choose” and that’s what I chose and learned to rosin its white horsehair bow. I wondered, Animal, where are you now? I slid the groove of the rosin down the question, listening for the horse.

[Somewhere inside these sentences is a secret letter to my mother about origins. When I say “violet” there are her hands spraying the starch and pressing the hot, blank face of the iron down into the cotton. When I say “rosin,” there is the long, dark-sap colored braid that she, for years, kept in her drawer after cutting it, one afternoon, clean off her head.]

In a small Italian town called Cremona, known for the making of acoustically profound violins, there is a violinmaker who once a year plays for the spruce tree forest where the wood of his violins was cut. The wood, in a way, singing back to its Once-Was. Inside the horsehair bow is a memory of horses. Inside the violin is the sound of the trees, and so on. A person is a plural and simultaneity carrying and carried by our Befores—the named and unnamed, species of ourselves and our others.

And this is the part I will write in purple in order to protect it: Dear Tommy, Esmé, Rickey, Brontez, Hansol, Anne, Patrick, Weike, Nathan, Antoinette—you have brought into language what only you could bring, and yet we know what you know, that there are countless oth-ers in this room, on this page, inside this alphabet and hour—human and not human, alive and dead, traceable and not traceable. The ones out of whom your voice was made. Their endurance flashes inside the language inextricable from your own listening, your own endurance. In English we write the letters from left to right, and they move, like us, in their strange processions between breath and nonbreath. I imagine that this Whiting will be for you a beautiful water, a renewal of courage or resource, along the way. I kiss my hands to that, and give thanks to all of your voices and versions, and especially to the parts of you who are, even now, smallest—whose work is most troubled or invisible. How you open new listening inside our listening. How your work—compass, challenge, companion—shapes our breath. And so the air. And so the history of air.

A R A CELIS GIRMAY is the au t hor of three poetry col le cti on s, Teeth; Kingdom Animalia, for which she won the I sabe lla Gardner Poetry Award and which was a f in alist for the National B ook Critics Circle Award a nd the Hurston/Wright Le g a cy Aw ard; and The Black Maria, which was named a nota b le wo r k toward her 2 0 1 7 Neustadt International Pr ize for Literature nom in a t ion. Girmay is currentl y a 2017–2018 June Jordan F el low and serves on the edito r ial board of the A f rican Poetry Book Fund. She wo n a Whiting Award in 2015. She lives in New York wi t h her spouse and their two children.

The Ten Winners of the 2018 Whiting Awards

POETRY AND NONFICTION

Anne Boyer

It was a time of many car troubles, so I waited for tow trucks and saw a squirrel with a marble in her mouth. It was a time of many money troubles, so I wrote about money or wanted to.

I thought I would write about money and then those who did not yet write about money would soon write about money.

What was I, poor? I spent seventy-three cents on a cookie for my daughter. I got a fifty-dollar Wal-Mart gift card in the mail. I sold a painting of a lamb for three hundred and eighty-five dollars.

During this time I invented many quotations about money:

It is right for MONEY to be indistinguishable from what is foreseen and not yet formulated. —René Char

MONEY never had a beginning. Always, until the moment of its stopping, it was constantly there. —Boris Pasternak

Be MONEY like the universe! —Fernando Pessoa

Such an act of judgment, distinguishing between Chance and Providence, deserves, surely, to be called MONEY. —W. H. Auden

Now so many people write about money that it is very easy, like writing about love. But in those days if you couldn’t write about what you had left, you couldn’t write about anything. I thought how uncomfortable it would be if I wrote about money. I thought about this a lot.

Things were great after that. They really got better. I wrote words in great paragraphs. There were great acorns. I had a great toothache. There was the great noise of the great leaving geese.

But I had been striking against geography for a very long time. Or rather, the systems I believed would end my loneliness amplified it, though I managed most days to feign delight in the wide expanses and simple clothing styles of my native land. These systems that amplified my loneliness included cars, airplanes, computers, and telephones. These systems included universities, literary presses, major American cities, the U. S. mail, and several private mail carriers including U. P. S. and Federal Express.

All my breathing apparatus rejected the air around me as not fit for breath, and storms turned streets into rivers. There was a city I didn’t always remember, and then once in it, I recalled it like all cities are recalled by birds.

There were gas lamps. There were dead sows full of living birds. I thought about the poet Marcia Nardi who wrote “as if there were no connection between my being stuck at the ribbon counter in Woolworth’s for eight hours a day at minimum hourly wage, and my inability to function as a poet.” I was melancholy and wrote defenses of my melancholy. I totally forgot to shop.

The anesthetizing influence of habit having ceased, I would begin to have thoughts, and feelings, and they were such sad things.

I wrote complicated sentences and cursed the fantasy of war. What was imagined was that which was found &/or fleshed &/or animated in the interior & that which abided by the interior’s logic rather than the material necessities of everything else—not a subjectivity composed of sentiments and sensations, but a subjectivity composed of acts and figures.

Maybe this was a halfway subjectivity or a connective one, what animated the forms of the material as they become the immaterial forms in the mind. When something was then imagined, it was experienced— with sensations and sentiments vivid as any other. Maybe any distrust of the imagination was a distrust of feeling and arose when one was unable to parse interior experiences (acts and figures) from interior responses (emotion and sensation) to those experiences.

My visions and dreams and flights of fancy were no more sentimental or sensational in themselves than events and interactions of the material world. Insofar as the imagination might be more cunning at provoking strong feelings it did not mean that the imagination was itself not inextricable from feeling. Dreams were the highest order of my experience. Then they were what I imagined was at best an entertaining fiction or sometimes a profitable product.

I wanted to keep unfashionable experience alive.

And there was, I thought, a reasonably justifiable distinction between she who was captivated by the imagination and she who was captivated by the world.

But a vision was not an event. What remained? Just a sorry state of fumy halls, dreams in a gas of acetone and ammonia doused in a floral bouquet: the Colonial Gardens, where I then lived, on the night of the chemical spill.

From Garments Against Women

ANNE BOYER is a poet and essayist. Her books include The Romance of Happy Workers (Coffee House Press, 2006), My Common Heart (Spooky Girlfriend Press, 2011), Garments Against Women (Ahsahta Press, 2015), which won the 2016 CLMP Firecracker award, and A Handbook of Disappointed Fate (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018). Her memoir The Undying is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2019. With Guillermo Parra and Cassandra Gillig, she has translated the work of 20th-century Venezuelan poets Victor Valera Mora, Miguel James, and Miyo Vestrini. With K. Silem Mohammad, she was a founding editor of the poetry journal Abraham Lincoln. Her essays have appeared in Guernica, The New Inquiry, Fullstop, and more. She is the recipient of the 2018 Cy Twombly Award for Poetry from the Foundation for Contemporary Art. Boyer was born in Kansas and is a professor at the Kansas City Art Institute. She lives in Kansas City, Missouri.

FICTION Patrick Cottrell

At the time of his death I was a thirty-two-year-old woman, single, childless, irregularly menstruating, college educated, and partially employed. If I looked in the mirror, I saw something upright and plain. Or perhaps hunched over and plain, it depended. Long, long ago I made peace with my plainness. I made peace with piano lessons that went nowhere because I had no natural talent or aptitude for music. I made peace with the coarse black hair that grows out of my head and hangs down stiffly to my shoulders. One day I even made peace with my uterus. Living in New York City for five years, I had discovered the easiest way to distinguish oneself was to have a conscience or a sense of morality, since most people in Manhattan were extraordinary thieves of various standing, some of them multi-billionaires. Over time, I became a genius at being ethical, I discovered that it was my true calling. I made little to no money as a part-time after-school supervisor of troubled young people, with the side work of ordering paper products for the toilets. After my first week, the troubled people gave me a nickname.

Hey, Sister Reliability, what’s up? Bum me a cigarette. Suck my dick. They never stopped smoking or saying disgusting things to me, those troubled young people living and dying in Manhattan, sewer of the earth! I was living and dying right next to them all the while attempting to maintain an ethical stance as their supervisor, although some days I will admit it was difficult to tell who was supervising whom. In theory, I have always been interested in the idea of ethical practices: how to live, what to do, so to speak. Being interested in something is partially how I cultivated my talent and genius, I thought, because I wasn’t born this way, I was born instead with no natural talents or capacities, I was born as a shabby little baby, but after a long and

unremarkable time, I became a virtuous woman, I transformed myself into something good, and one by-product of this particular nature was behavior that seemed to land mostly on the ethical side of things and, at worst, the retiring and overly apologetic side. Pragmatic, I have always preferred to be in the background, unobserved; I preferred to play the role of the detached observer/receiver, the way one would live if one lived and spoke and shat inside a puffy white cloud floating along above the world harmlessly like a balloon.

Think of me as your balloon, I would tell my troubled young people, I’m always next to you or hovering right above you. After I said that, I noticed some of them didn’t seem to know what a balloon was, they looked at me so confusedly, I was compelled to assume they had never even seen a fucking balloon. So one bright afternoon a few months ago, I drank a few gin-and-tonics before work, which I do not often do, and then I forced them to watch a DVD of The Red Balloon at our after-school facility. We were not allowed to sit alone in darkened rooms with the troubled young people, all of the overhead lights were on, making it difficult to see the screen. My face was bright red, like the balloon, which one of them observed astutely. I told them to focus on the beautiful film I was screening for their viewing pleasure and to stop looking at me. Then I broke the rules and turned off the lights. I spent the next five minutes or so pointing out for them how each scene was so artfully composed, it was almost like watching a painting come alive.

It’s a painting come alive, children, do you see it? I said with excitement.

Halfway through the film, I felt nauseous, ran into the bathroom, locked the door, and threw up for almost an hour. When I came out, the lights were on, the movie shut off, and they sat there in silence, staring at me with their mouths opened. I must have been making really loud retching sounds.

The point is I always knew my talents would be useful one day, I said to the coworker who asked me what I was doing showing a group

of at-risk Latino and African American teenage boys The Red Balloon. Then I employed a strategy I have honed throughout my life when asked a difficult question: to respond with a question of my own. I asked my coworker pointedly what the troubled people’s race had to do with it, couldn’t Latino and African American people watch and enjoy The Red Balloon? And what I said previously was true: I always knew my talents would be helpful to someone, someday.

From Sorry to Disrupt the Peace

PATRICK COTTRELL was born in Korea and r aised in Pittsburgh, Chica go, an d M i l wau kee. H is work has appeared or i s for thcoming in Guernica, BOMB, Gulf Coast, and others. He lives in Brookl yn. Sorry To Disrupt the Peace is his first novel, long-listed for the Times Literary Supplement’s Repub l i c of Consciousness Prize, and the winner of the Best Fi r st Book – Fiction 2017 Nationa l M edal from t he Independent Publisher Book Aw a rds.

DRAMA

Nathan Alan Davis

DONTRELL wakes from a vivid dream. He picks up a minicassette recorder, turns it on and speaks into it. In doing so, he addresses the audience.

DONTRELL

Captain’s log: Future generations, whoever finds this: I hope it finds you well. This Dontrell Jones the Third, of Baltimore. Spittin’ to you live through space and time. As your advanced technologies and mental-intuitive capacities may or may not allow you to decipher, I’m in my PJs right now.

T-shirt and mesh. That’s how I rest. But If I had known last night what I would dream!?

COMPANY [DANIELLE] (Heartbeats) Bum-bum.

COMPANY [SHEA] Pitter.

COMPANY [MOM] Patter.

DONTRELL

If I had known last night what I would dream…

ALL COMPANY

Heart-beat. Heart-beat.

DONTRELL

I woulda put on a suit y’all, I’m tellin’ you.

COMPANY [ERIKA]

Deep breath.

One more.

COMPANY [ROBBY]

COMPANY [DAD]

One more.

DONTRELL

Just dreamt of a captive African, name unknown, One among a mass of tight-packed bodies, Swaying with the tide of the Atlantic In the womb-like darkness of a slaver’s vessel.

Said African is alert. A cunning mind. I hear his shackles opening. I hear A thud as his feet meet the floor -

ALL COMPANY (lightly) (thud.)

DONTRELL

And I can see him now: He has my father’s face. I speak to him: “I am Dontrell Jones the Third. What is your name?” At this, he walks away. I trail his footsteps. He squeezes through a doorway. I follow him: and we are among the women.

He taps one on the shoulder, she stirs He tells her his name

-This dreamer did not hear itShe tells him hers

-Again, too low a whisperFor awhile they are silent.

COMPANY [MOM] Silent.

COMPANY [DAD] Silent.

COMPANY [DANIELLE] Silent.

DONTRELL

She speaks to him again. He climbs on top of her.

She spreads her legs as best she can in her little cubby. They intertwine as best they can. They find each other’s rhythm.

Her fields cultivate themselves, and a little seed is nourished there. They lie together. Man, woman and child.

In darkness and the stench of the belly of the ship, Floating on the freshness of the new moon sea. Before sunrise, the man rises.

He climbs through a small hatchway to the deck. He stands tall on the wall of the ship. With dawn approaching, the setting stars seem to cradle him. He turns his head slowly to the right, then to the left. He springs into the deep.

As I rush to the ship’s edge to give chase, The cool air blows my eyes awakeAnd I am here.

Dawn’s early light at my window.

…

I’ll let it in.

DONTRELL gestures as if opening blinds or curtains. Soft light streams in.

DONTRELL

You hear that, future? ( holds his recorder to capture the silence)

A city that knows how to sleep. But I may never rest soundly again: How am I to answer this priceless vision? Should I believe what I already think I know? That it’s now my burden to pull him up to shore?

DANIELLE enters.

DANIELLE

Mama say come get breakfast, punk.

From Dontrell, Who Kissed the Sea

NATHAN ALAN DAVIS is a playwright from Rockford, Illinois, now living in New York. His produced plays include Nat Turner in Jerusalem (NYTW, 2016; New York Magazine Critic’s Pick); Dontrell, Who Kissed the Sea (NNPN Rolling World Premiere, 2015; Los Angeles Times Critic’s Choice; Steinberg/ATCA New Play Citation); and The Wind and the Breeze (Cygnet Theatre, San Diego, forthcoming in 2018). Nathan is a Usual Suspect at New York Theatre Workshop, a Lecturer in Theater at Princeton University, and a 2016 graduate of Juilliard’s Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Program. He received his MFA from Indiana University and BFA from the University of Illinois.

Hansol Jung

Look up: Late night snack delivery nearby,Search. search

CHORUS 10111 001010 011001 11101 00111 001001 11001

What’s on your mind? What’s on your mind? What’s on your…

CHORUS

-What’s on your mind? What’s on your …

-Ding! from Calendar Traffic is slower than usual. Leave now for meeting with 101100101

POP UP Breaking News! Missile test from the North.

101100 101100

-Ding! from Calendar Traffic is slower than 101100101 -Ding! from Calendar 1011001 01 Ding! 01 Ding! 01 Ding! Dingdingdingding 2 underlined word binary cue

No response

Search

ALL

MAN

WOMAN

Escape ALL

No response

Close.

System not responding

Reboot.

Voooooooooooooong~ Bum!

- Katok Katok!

Your have one new talk from Song Ji Ah.

MAN & WOMAN

CHORUS

MAN & WOMAN

CHORUS

WOMAN

CHORUS

- Nanhee, it’s Ji Ah. Here’s the number for my broker. He goes by Mister Lee. Not cheap but worth it.

MAN

Poke Heejin Cook. You have successfully poked Heejin Cook. Minsung, what’s on your mind?

WOMAN

Nanhee, what’s on your mind?

Brinng Brinng

Brinng Brinng

CHORUS

Brinng Brinng

Brinng

- The account you’re trying to reach is currently unavailable. Leave a message after the Peeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep

MINSUNG & NANHEE

Hi.

MINSUNG

It’s me, Minsung.

NANHEE

MINSUNG

Mister Lee, This is Yoo Nanhee

I’m alone at the office

NANHEE

I got your number from my friend Song Ji Ah, she says you were able to connect her to her family in the North.

MINSUNG & NANHEE

I wanted to talk to you

NANHEE

because I am also one with family in North Korea, I defected about four years ago.

MINSUNG

I called our daughter but she is not picking up, so I am calling the wife. Hi wife.

NANHEE

I want to smuggle a phone to them.

Pick up the phone wife.

MINSUNG

NANHEE

MINSUNG & NANHEE call me.

NANHEE

If you can help please

I miss you.

- Disconnected.

- No new emails.

- No new text messages.

- No new Facebook notifications.

MINSUNG

CHORUS

Again, this is Yoo Nanhee.

HANSOL JUNG is a playwright and director from South Korea. Her productions include Cardboard Piano, Among the Dead, No More Sad Things, Wolf Play, and Wild Goose Dreams. Her work has been developed at the Royal Court, New York Theatre Workshop, Berkeley Repertory’s Ground Floor, and more. She is the recipient of the P73 Playwright Fellowship, Rita Goldberg Playwrights’ Workshop Fellowship at the Lark, 2050 Fellowship at New York Theatre Workshop, and others. Jung has translated over thirty English musicals into Korean. She holds a Playwriting MFA from the Yale School of Drama and is a member of the Ma-Yi Theatre Writers Lab.

MAN Scroll

From Wild Goose Dreams

POETRY

Rickey Laurentiis

“Boy with Thorn” Unknown, first century BC, bronze

1.

Entered, those shadows spoke his loneliness like a god.

2.

This was new knowledge. The kind he had little business knowing. The mere risk of it making it all the more delicious.

3. A forced-out confession. A forcing-it-in.

4.

Each push, where the blood yawned like an opiate. Each inch, a hermeneutics of the self.

5. Would you feed on such hurting, would you drink so much?

6.

Was he so terrible a thing to look at? But was looked at.

7.

His face chiseled deliberate. His face, a question gone unanswered—

8.

There could have been a thorn already inside? His tongue. Scratching its wrongs, speaking its six troubles.

9. How?

10.

There could have been a thorn already inside? The point in his eye. What makes the shadows their acutest when they lift and sprawl.

11.

I keep thinking of the thorn as a marker, scrawler, what shapes the places both excused and forbidden in his body’s swamp.

12.

Violence thou shalt want. Violence thou shalt steal and store inside.

13.

This Spinario, Fedele, boy with a message, a mission; Pickaninny— Who would not stop for damage, the old story goes . . .

14.

Shame, guilt, spleen, woe, shock, and want.

15.

He wanted them gone, I know: all his deeper hurts, poorer gods, that lush resentment.

16.

But failed. They were greater dark, vials of mystery, done things.

17.

Take it. Don’t you have to learn to take it, eventually?

18.

I told him the thorn was as a key, his body a lock.

19.

I made him meet the key up with the lock. Turn.

20.

I told him, Rickey, turn—

21.

He did: an anti-chrysalis, a lyric, which is the piece of a prayer visible.

22.

Until he rewound: a new republic, a kingdom where not savagely he was king.

23. Who could bare the wind?

24.

Who could feel the self demanding the self?

25.

Who could see his honesty? His face more handsome once the pain combed through, combed like a river too clean for love.

26.

Violence thou shalt want. Violence thou shalt steal and store inside.

27. He would devour it.

28.

This was his body, his body finally his.

29.

He shut the thorn up in his foot, and told his foot Walk.

RICKEY LAURENTIIS was raised in New Orleans, Louisiana. Boy with Thorn, his debut book, won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the Levis Reading Prize, and was a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. His other honors include fellowships from the Lannan Literary Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Poetry Foundation. Currently he lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he is the inaugural Fellow in Creative Writing at the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics at the University of Pittsburgh.

Antoinette Nwandu

NOTE: This play should NOT have an intermission. If Moses and Kitch cannot leave, neither can you.

MOSES

man what’chu fixta do today man damn KITCH

man i’on know man what’chu fixta do

MOSES got plans you feel me big ol plans

KITCH got plans to stand there stroke yo dick

MOSES

man fuck you man

KITCH

nigga what kinda plans you got

MOSES

got plans to rise up to my full potential be all i could be you feel me

KITCH left left left right left

MOSES

yo fuck you nigga dat shit ain’t funny KITCH

yo moses man i thought it was MOSES

niGGa man i got plans to git my ass up off dis block KITCH off dis block here

MOSES yeah nigga damn man i ain’t stutter

KITCH a’ight nigga damn

MOSES a’ight KITCH

cept cept you gittin up off dis block man where you goin

MOSES

yo what KITCH

i sed my nigga you gittin up off dis block where you gon go

MOSES kitch KITCH what MOSES

dat promised land KITCH niGGa promised land top ten go MOSES nigga KITCH come on my nigga less play

MOSES

man ain’tchu tired KITCH

jess go go

MOSES

collard greens and pinto beans

KITCH

dats two MOSES nigga don’t play dat counts as one

KITCH yo how you figure

MOSES

iss one plate uh food KITCH

one plate uh—

nigga

man yeah a’ight

MOSES

KITCH

MOSES one hot plate of collard greens & pinto beans

KITCH

one MOSES

brown bunnies

KITCH

two MOSES my bright red superman kite

KITCH

three MOSES

drawer full uh clean socks

KITCH

okay see now dats a good one fo MOSES

my brotha here wit me back from da dead

KITCH

five MOSES

yo moms here too KITCH

six MOSES soft sheets i’m sleepin on em good KITCH

seven MOSES

my woman next to me she sleepin on em too

KITCH since when you got a woman MOSES

i don’t

but’chu sed—

KITCH

MOSES

iss da promised land nigga if i wanna woman imma have me a woman

KITCH

okay nigga damn jess askin if you got candidates

MOSES

man i ain’t met her yet shit but dats a’ight i’ll know her when i see her man bess believe

KITCH

yo moses dats deep i’ll. know. her. when. i. see. her. yeah yeah i guess i knew rochelle was fixta be mine first time i seent her too

MOSES

she ain’tchors kitch

KITCH

i know

yo do you

MOSES

KITCH

we git up off dis block she fixta be mine

MOSES

ya fixta be

MOSES and KITCH breathe together.

KITCH

a’ight man you got’cho eight

MOSES world peace

KITCH

niGGa

MOSES

jess playin man lemme see KITCH

maaaaaan how da fuck you spect we fixta git up off dis block pass ovuh

MOSES

yo kitch man first of all i ain’t sed “we” KITCH

da fuck you mean by dat MOSES

i mean yo ass ain’t comin KITCH what MOSES

you ain’t invited nigga damn

KITCH

yo moses dat’s fucked up MOSES yo how you figure KITCH

cuz my nigga damn man you my nigga you got plans mean i got plans right wit’chu moses moses i got plans right wit’chu right

From Pass Over

ANTOINETTE NWANDU is a New York-based playwright. In 2018, her play Breach: a manifesto on race in america through the eyes of a black girl recovering from self-hate will premiere at Victory Gardens, and her play Pass Over will run at LCT3/Lincoln Center. A filmed version of Pass Over—directed by Spike Lee—premiered at Sundance and will stream on Amazon Prime. Antoinette is a MacDowell Fellow, Dramatists Guild Fellow, and Ars Nova PlayGroup alum. Institutions supporting her work include Sundance Theater Lab, Space on Ryder Farm, Ignition Fest, the Cherry Lane Mentor Project, Page 73, and PlayPenn. Honors include the Paula Vogel Playwriting Award and spots on the 2016 and 2017 Kilroys lists. Antoinette is under commission from Echo Theater Company, Colt Coeur, Audible, and Ars Nova.

POETRY

Tommy

Pico

Onstage I’m a mess of tremor and sweat

I must have some face-blindness? bc I can’t tell the difference btwn the faces of attention and danger

The gift of panic is clarity—repeat the known quantities:

Today is Wednesday.

Wednesday is a turkey burger.

My throat is full of survivors.

Science says trauma cd be passed down, molecular scar tissue, DNA cavorting w/war and escape routes and yr dad’s bad dad

I’ve inherited this idea to disappear Oh but you’re a natural performer

In the mid 1800s, California wd pay $5 for the head of an NDN and 25¢ per scalp—man, woman, or child. The state was reimbursed by the feds

When yr descended from a clever self adept at evading an occupying force, when contact meant another swath of sick cousins, another cosmology snuffed, another stolen sister

and the water and the blood and the blood and the blood and the blood and the blood

u flush under the hot lights *

I can’t write a nature poem bc that conversation happens in the Hall of South American Peoples in the American Museum of Natural History btwn two white ladies in buttery shawls as they pass a display case of “traditional” garb from one tribe or another it doesn’t really matter to anyone and that word Natural in Natural History hangs also History also Peoples hangs as in frames

it’s horrible how their culture was destroyed as if in some reckless storm but thank god we were able to save some of these artifacts—history is so important. Will you look at this metalwork? I could cry—

Look, I’m sure you really do just want to wear those dream catcher earrings. They’re beautiful. I’m sure you don’t mean any harm, I’m sure you don’t really think abt us at all. I’m sure you don’t understand the concept of off-limits. But what if by not wearing a headdress in yr music video or changing yr damn mascot and perhaps adding .05% of personal annoyance to yr life for the twenty minutes it lasts, the 103 young ppl who tried to kill themselves on the Pine Ridge Indian reservation over the past four months wanted to live 50% more

I don’t want to be seen, generally, I’m a natural introvert, n I def don’t want to be seen by white ladies in buttery shawls, but I will literally die if I don’t scream

*

An NDN poem must reference alcoholism, like I started drinking again after Mike Brown and Sandra Bland and Charleston I felt so underwater it made no sense to keep dry

In my poem, I cdn’t get out of bed for two days after Mike Brown and Sandra Bland and Charleston

me n sweatpants n a new york slice

I feel dry as California where I somehow managed to thrive in a climate of drought for thousands of years w/o draining the state, yet somehow we were primitive?

Consequence shapes behavior. So does the absence of consequences.

America says some ppl are raised guilty. Some are innocent of everything. Some ppl will always have to be good sports remain calm

Remain Calm

Remain Calm

Who even wants to go into space? I fucking hate traveling I’m a weirdo NDN faggot and frankly that limits my prospects plus it sucks—watching the couples and the string lights slow-dance in Monbijoupark, to realize despite history

my own abrupt American body

America that green ghost, been after me for at least a couple hundred years somehow once convinced me to do its dirty work for it sharp in a warm bath

Sun breaks upon the Pacific Northwest. Is this a nature poem again

TOMMY PICO is author of the books IRL (Birds, LLC, 2016), Nature Poem (Tin House Books, 2017), and Junk (forthcoming 2018 from Tin House Books).

He was a Queer/Art/Mentors inaugural fellow, 2013 Lambda Literary fellow in poetry, 2016 Tin House summer poetry scholar, 2017 NYSCA/NYFA Fellow in Poetry from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and won the Brooklyn Public Library’s 2017 Literature Prize. Originally from the Viejas Indian reservation of the Kumeyaay nation, he now lives in Brooklyn where he co-curates the reading series Poets With Attitude (PWA) with Morgan Parker, co-hosts the podcast Food 4 Thot, and is a contributing editor at Literary Hub

From Nature Poem

FICTION

Brontez Purnell

Before DeShawn left for Alabama and before his uncle’s death, others had gone. For instance, Arnold was dead. Dead, dead, dead as Latin. He sank with the Titanic. He flew the coop. That monkey had gone to heaven. It seemed that all the wild men around him were dying faster than he could keep track. Arnold was not the first, but he was of note.

DeShawn received the message on the morning train, on the way to classes in Oakland, and he hopped on the next train back to nowhere. There was nowhere to mourn the dead boy. Arnold had not lived in any one place for long, and had pulled so much shit that no one really loved him that much anymore. Or maybe they were waiting to love him again after he climbed out of the hole he had dug himself. Like he would appear out of thin air, a magician’s assistant with a tiara and a sash that said “Healed” or something. The dead boy died before completing that magic trick. He would be that type of memory: one to forget. Three days of crying ensued and then a phone call. Arnold’s final roommate called DeShawn and asked very sweetly if he would clean the dead boy’s room. DeShawn said yes.

This would be his last favor to Arnold. He had loved Arnold. No one knew they were fucking, and from outward appearances it probably seemed like a casual camaraderie. Fucked-up boy loves even more fucked-up boy. It was rainy, and DeShawn showed up with supplies to clean the dead boy’s room.

There were old clothes, new needles, crack pipes, Lorca poetry, and books by Bukowski. The dead boy was gentle-featured and very, very handsome. He had tried to get clean this last time, couldn’t, and then stepped in front of a car.

DeShawn’s mind shifted to his faraway youth, a certain redneck boss with permed and teased hair, smoking and sharing her thoughts on

suicide. She said, “If you are brave enough to jump off a building or shoot yourself in the head then you are BRAVE. ENOUGH. TO. LIVE.”

He took it as truth because an adult had said it. And he had believed it, up until the point that he knew someone who stepped in front of a car. Up until the point he stepped in front of that car, Arnold had not been a brave person. He was fatigued, and he had made a choice. DeShawn stood over an unopened jigsaw puzzle. He wondered what Arnold felt the moment that car struck him. Had he regretted it? DeShawn believed in energy, and he believed in the other side. He lit candles, paid respect to the eight corners, and prayed—that is, hoped—that the gentle, handsome departed boy was resting in power. He asked whatever god was listening to hear him on this. He set up Arnold’s altar—a white candle and a glass of water—on the highest point in his room.

There were, of course, people around town who liked to talk. They called the handsome dead boy a junkie, and after that they called him a thief. This was true. “He was also a loved child of God,” offered Arnold’s mother. Maybe this was also true.

Away from the talkers and gossipers was Arnold and DeShawn’s criminally minded and largely harmless inner circle. It is a beautiful thing to surround oneself with people who have pulled too much sketchy shit to ever judge anyone. The type of people you could fuck over, as long as you prove it wasn’t anything personal. Everything around Arnold went missing—rent money, LPs, stamp collections. Naturally, there was some resentment. But then again, everyone saw in Arnold a brother who was in deep pain. Which made his trespasses not forgettable, but forgivable. Somewhere, Arnold had his wings.

But there was still the matter of cleaning the room. DeShawn knew he couldn’t clean it all at once. It would take days, and that was fine. There wasn’t the dead boy’s laughter to hear on the phone anymore. There

wouldn’t be his physical presence in the room, by the window strumming a guitar or smoking, or standing naked, with the most beautiful erection you could imagine. The place where Arnold’s life made a rude exit was now a black hole, a deterioration in the film loop. This void meant there was time. Cleaning up a mess takes time. DeShawn knew that in order to clean up the dead boy’s room, like, to really clean it, he would have to put on the armor of detachment. Detachment was a beautiful thing. You needed detachment to be nonjudgmental. He didn’t want to say that Arnold was a selfish piece of shit for dying. He wanted to feel noble about it. He stayed neutral and nonjudgmental as a strategy to keep moving, a bargaining tool to keep the darker thoughts at bay.

From Since I Laid My Burden Down

BRONTEZ PURNELL is a zinester, writer, dancer, and musician who lives in Oakland, California. He is originally from Triana, Alabama. Brontez has written for various publications, including the online edition of Jigsaw, San Francisco Weekly, and Maximum Rock & Roll

Esmé Weijun Wang

The debate over AB 1421 touched upon crucial issues of autonomy and civil liberties. The bill makes the crucial assumption that a person who displays a certain level of mental disorder is no longer capable of choosing treatment, including medication, and therefore must be forced into doing so. Sartre claimed, “We are our choices,” but what has a person become when it’s assumed that said person is innately incapable of choice?

#

“If only I could have gotten my shit together, everybody else’s lives would have been fine, was the message that I was getting constantly, and so I was responsible for other people’s happiness.”

Julian Plumadore is the manager of the anti-stigma SOLVE (Sharing Our Lives, Voices, and Experiences) speakers’ bureau, and former Community Advocate, of the Mental Health Association of San Francisco, a “peer-run, recovery-oriented organization.” I know Plumadore because I’ve been a speaker for SOLVE since 2013, and have heard in his talks the way he understands his recovery. He describes his story as one in which he was targeted as the “identified patient”; the term is based on research on family homeostasis, and describes a pattern of behavior in which a dysfunctional family identifies one of its members as mentally ill, though their symptoms are actually manifestations of the family’s pathology.

Plumadore is against forced treatment. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him in anything but a button-down shirt, tie, and slacks, which is a conscious choice on his part; it’s what he wears to meetings like the AB 1421 hearings, where the visual difference between the pro- and anti-AB 1421 constituents are obvious. “The rooms were divided,” he said. “They were visibly split in two, and the power imbalance in those rooms was tangible. On one side of the room you’d have the people who basically hold the power in society. Generally white, upper-middleclass, well-dressed professional people, the family members; and then on the other side of the room, you’d have a much more diverse group, generally more dressed down. And,” he finished wryly, “you could see in the room who was actually having the mental health issues, and who were the people who were essentially trying to get them committed.”

He told me about one woman he spoke to at an AB 1421 hearing. A mother. She spoke to him, he said, about her 40-year-old son, who is “living at home with her where he belongs.” To her, she is “his only hope.” He highlights both lines with horror. “They’re so afraid of something bad happening to [their loved ones] out on the street, or out in the rest of the world, or [their family members] can’t take care of themselves, [so] they guard them and keep them home. And that situation becomes increasingly tense and frustrating for everyone involved.”

He knows about these situations, he tells me, because he was one of those people. The people who support forcible treatment sometimes don’t believe him when he talks from personal experience about abusing substances, being homeless, or acting, as he describes, “scary in public.” He’s better now, he tells me, because he was finally told by someone else that he himself knows better than anyone else what he needs. For him, that included harm reduction techniques instead of involuntary rehabilitation, as well as estranging himself from the rest of his family. Because he could discern a method of recovery for himself, he believes that the issue of personal, bodily autonomy must take precedent. He speaks of those with mental illness almost universally experiencing the effects of trauma when forced into treatment, and disagrees with the concept of “hurting someone to help someone.” “We have the ultimate decision about what we’re going to allow into our bodies, what we’re not, and the decisions that we make about our own lives,” he said.

A crucial concept in the discussion of schizophrenia, psychotic disorders, and treatment is that of how far the possession goes—or, in psychiatric terms, the level of “insight” the individual is capable of. To have poor insight is to have a lack of awareness about one’s own condition. A fundamental argument for forcible treatment is that the unwell individual simply doesn’t understand that they’re ill, and therefore lacks the ability to decide for themselves whether, for example, to take the recommended medication. Whether a person diagnosed with severe mental illness will take medication is an issue that repeatedly comes up in communities affected by mental illness; psychiatrists use the pejorative term “medication noncompliant” to describe those patients who won’t take recommended medications, no matter the reason for the patient’s decision.

I asked Beth, whose adult son lives with schizoaffective disorder, what she wishes people would better understand, or what they currently misunderstand, about psychotic disorders. “There’s all this stuff about, Give people information and they’ll seek help on their own,” she said. “Somebody who has a mind that they cannot trust because it’s been taken over by whatever chemicals are not allowing them to think straight needs help in getting care, and they might need to be forced into it. It’s comparable to Alzheimer’s. Not to say that people with paranoid schizophrenia are demented or stupid, but they lose the ability to make rational decisions.”

The mind has been taken over. The mind has lost the ability to make rational decisions. There’s something in there, but it’s not whomever it is we formerly believed it to be. Depression is often compared to diabetes—in other words, it’s not your fault if you get it, and you’ll be fine if you just take care of it. Schizophrenia, on the other hand, is compared to Alzheimer’s—it’s still not your fault if you get it, but there’s no fixing it, and though you may not intend to be a burden, you’ll still be one until you die.

#

I do have experience with the loss of autonomy that comes with involuntary treatment, as well as the status that comes with being described as lacking a sense of one’s own illness: I was hospitalized against my will in 2002, 2003, and 2011, and the records from my first involuntary, inpatient psychiatric hospitalization stated that I had “poor insight.”

It is hard to convey the horror of being involuntarily committed. First, there’s the terrifying experience of forcibly being put in a small place where you’re not allowed to leave. You are not allowed to leave, but you’re also not allowed to know how long you’ll be there, because no one knows how long you’ll be there. You don’t have the things that you love with you: your journal, the bracelet your grandmother gave you, your favorite socks. Your teddy bear. There are no computers. In the hospitals where I’ve stayed, the only phones allowed were the landlines, which could be used at certain times of day for a certain period, causing patients to jockey for position by the phones and to bicker over who’s been taking too long.

Sometimes, someone will be allowed to bring something you cherish to you during visiting hours, although this must take place after a nurse inspects the goods; a lot of the time, your possessions won’t be permitted into the ward because they include a sharp point or a wire coil or a dangerous piece of cloth. You’re not allowed to choose what you eat, and within the limited choices that do exist, you’re forced to choose only between things that are disgusting. You are told when to sleep and when to wake up. If you spend too much time in your bedroom, it indicates that you’re being antisocial; if you do sit in the common areas, but don’t interact with the other patients, you’re probably depressed or overly inward or perhaps even catatonic. Humans might all be ciphers to one another, but people with mental illness are particularly opaque because of our broken brains; we cannot be trusted about anything, including our own experiences.

From The Collected Schizophrenias

ESMÉ WEIJUN WANG is the author of The Border of Paradise: A Novel, named one of NPR’s Best Books of 2016, and is the recipient of the 2016 Graywolf Nonfiction Prize for her forthcoming essay collection, The Collected Schizophrenias. Her essays and stories have appeared in Catapult, Elle, and The Believer, among others. She was named one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists in 2017, and is a recipient of the Hopwood Award for Novel-in-Progress, the Louis Sudler Award for Creative Writing from Stanford University, and a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation. She holds an MFA from the University of Michigan and lives in San Francisco.

Weike Wang FICTION

The boy asks the girl a question. It is a question of marriage. Ask me again tomorrow, she says, and he says, That’s not how this works.

Diamond is no longer the hardest mineral known to man. New Scientist reports that lonsdaleite is. Lonsdaleite is 58 percent harder than diamond and forms only when meteorites smash themselves into Earth.

The lab mate says to make a list of pros and cons. Write it all down, prove it to yourself.

She then nods sympathetically and pats me on the arm.

The lab mate is a solver of hard problems. Her desk is next to mine but is neater and more result-producing.

Big deal, she says of her many, many publications and doesn’t take herself too seriously, is busy but not that busy, talks about things other than chemistry.

I find her outlook refreshing, yet strange. If I were that accomplished, I would casually bring up my published papers in conversation. Have you read so-and-so? Because it is quite worth your time. The tables alone are beautiful and well formatted.

I have only one paper out. The tables are in fact very beautiful, all clear and double-spaced line borders. All succinct and informative titles.

Somewhere I read that the average number of readers for a scientific paper is 0.6.

So I make the list. The pros are extensive.

Eric cooks dinner. Eric cooks great dinners. Eric hands me the toothbrush with toothpaste on it and sometimes even sticks it in my mouth. Eric takes out the trash, the recycling; waters all our plants because I can’t seem to remember that they’re living things. These leaves feel crunchy, he said after the week that he was gone.

He goes that week to California for a conference with other young and established chemists.

Also Eric drives me to lab when it’s too rainy to bike. Boston sees a great deal of rain. Sometimes the rain comes down horizontal and hits the face.

Also Eric walks the dog. We have a dog. Eric got him for me.

I realize that I don’t have any cons. I knew this going in.

It is a half-list, I tell the lab mate the next day, and she offers to buy me a cookie.

In lab, there are two boxes filled with argon. It is where I do highly sensitive chemistry, the kind that can never see air. Once air is let in, the chemicals catch fire. It is also where I wish to put my head on days of nothing going right.

On those days, I add the wrong amount of catalyst. Or I add the wrong catalyst.

Catalysts make reactions go faster. They lower activation energy, which is the indecision each reaction faces before committing to its path.

What use is this work in the long run? I ask myself in the room when I am alone. The solvent room officially, but I have renamed it the Fortress of Solitude.

Eric is no longer in this lab. He graduated last year and is now in another lab. A chemistry PhD takes at least five years to complete. We met when I was in my first and he was in his second.

Now I walk around our apartment and trip over his stuff: big black drum bags and steel pots and carboys with brown liquid fermenting inside. Eric plays the drums and brews beer. One con is how much space these two hobbies take up, but this is outweighed by the drums that I like to hear and the beer that I like to drink.

My pro list grows at an exponential rate.

We had talked about marriage before. Can you see yourself settling down, having kids? Can you see yourself starting a family? I didn’t say no, but I didn’t say yes. We had these talks casually. Each time, he thought if actually proposed to, I would say something different.

At least now all my cards are on the table, he says. But please don’t take too long to decide.

Bad tempers run in my family. It is the dominant allele, like black hair. Eric has red hair. Our friends have asked if there is any way our babies will turn out to be gingers. Gingers are dying out, and our friends are concerned about Eric’s beautiful locks.

I say, Unless Mendel was completely wrong about genetics, our babies will have my hair.

But our friends can still dream. An Asian baby with red hair. One friend says, You could write a Science paper on that and then apply for academic jobs and then get tenure.

Eric is already looking for academic jobs. He wants to teach at a college that primarily serves undergrads.

Because they are the future, he says. Eager to learn, energetic, and happy, more or less, as compared with grad students. With undergrads, I can make a real difference.

I don’t say this but I think it: You are the only person I know who talks like that. So enthusiastically and benefit-of-the-doubt-giving.

But the colleges he’s interested in are not in Boston. They are in places like Oberlin, Ohio.

I am certain that Eric will get the job. His career path is very straight, like that of an arrow to its target. If I were to draw my path out, it would look like a gas particle flying around in space.

The lab mate often echoes the wisdom of many chemists before her. You must love chemistry even when it is not working. You must love chemistry unconditionally.

From Chemistry

WEIKE WANG is the author of the novel Chemistry (Knopf, 2017) and her short fiction has been published in Glimmer Train, the Alaska Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, and others. Wang is a finalist for the 2018 Aspen Words Literary Prize and a 5 Under 35 National Book Foundation honoree. She holds a BA from Harvard University, an SM and SD from the Harvard Chan School of Public Health, and an MFA in Fiction from Boston University. She lives in New York City.

PERMISSIONS

Introduction copyright © 2018 by Aracelis Girmay

Excerpt from Garments Against Women by Anne Boyer. Copyright © 2018 by Anne Boyer. Published by Ahsahta Press in 2015. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from Sorry to Disrupt the Peace by Patty Yumi Cottrell. Copyright © 2018 by Patty Yumi Cottrell. Published by McSweeney’s in 2017. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from Dontrell, Who Kissed the Sea by Nathan Alan Davis. Copyright © 2018 by Nathan Alan Davis. Published by Samuel French in 2017. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from Wild Goose Dreams by Hansol Jung. Copyright © 2018 by Hansol Jung. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from Boy with Thorn by Rickey Laurentiis. Copyright © 2018 by Rickey Laurentiis. Published by University of Pittsburgh Press in 2015. All rights reserved.

Except from Pass Over by Antoinette Nwandu. Copyright © 2018 by Antoinette Nwandu. Forthcoming from Samuel French. All rights reserved.

Except from Nature Poem by Tommy Pico. Copyright © 2018 by Tommy Pico. Published by Tin House in 2017. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from Since I Laid My Burden Down by Brontez Purnell. Copyright © 2018 by Brontez Purnell. Published by The Feminist Press in 2017. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from The Collected Schizophrenias by Esmé Weijun Wang. Copyright © 2018 by Esmé Weijun Wang. Forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2018. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from Chemistry by Weike Wang. Copyright © 2018 by Weike Wang. Published by Knopf in 2017. All rights reserved.

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