SUPPORTED BY UNITED AGENTS The White Review Short Story Prize is an annual short story competition for emerging writers. Established with support from a Jerwood Charitable Foundation Small...
The tree has fallen in the middle of the yard, cracked to quarters during last night’s storm ...
It would’ve been easier if she hadn’t been known
For the chickens But she was famous for these white,
Undappled hens, which she’d bring to Perquín to sell
On weekends The mayor’s chickens, they were called,
As if her husband would ever want them (regal though
They were), elegant as the egrets that are still
Left to wander the presidential palace in Panama City
By the time it happened, the buildings had gathered up
The evening to form a landscape, and the streets grown
Rancid, like oblong containers from the kind of potluck,
In a dank small town, that people will choose to attend
Out of boredom, and call a world Her son was staying
In San Salvador to study, and so she was alone
They came for her, and her
Box of hens, in three military vehicles, the passengers
Disguised as radicals It would be different if they hadn’t
Been so quiet They arrested her She was accused of
Standing with guerrillas, Vesta at her hearth, in her slacks
And a dead son’s blazer, like a queen expatriate
In tenuous provinces And her crime was simple, she was
The Mother of Intellectuals, the ideal accomplice
It’s noted among us that this was recorded in mediocre
Spelling, in a functionary’s awkward Palmer hand,
As mader de intelectos [sic], a piece of wood, then,
Made of the intellect To make her an idea
Of accomplishment — it would’ve be different if they
Hadn’t been so quiet Soon, some women
Who stood outside the barracks — the ones who
Ordinarily might jump to buy white chickens — turned
When they heard her singing and heard her ringing
Her keys against the walls, as if her room were full
Of open doors, as if her greatest urgency should be
That the room should leave to meet the evening
Slowly they turned her body into a torso Then it was
A floor Rarely do rooms like these have hands
(This work is an extract from a longer poem of the same name.) This is a...
You realise you haven’t eaten in days
Dirty dishes line the counters; your twin toddlers
glitch in and out of their high chairs, mustering
twin howls of outrage
You give up;
pass out on a floor slick with plumbing malfunctions
Someone, as always, is watching
and will come to your aid
Your husband is home from work
but his pay barely touches the bills strewn
across the front lawn Sometimes
you wish for a meteor, or a swarm of bees
Sometimes you think the only way out
of this suburban hellscape is through the foundations,
trapped waist-deep, pissing yourself into the cellar
Someone will make it all right;
and anyway none of this is real:
leading scientists
guess we are ninety-nine-per-cent probably
living a simulation
Against your better judgment, you pull up a chair and
Play Video Games until 6 am
You realise you haven’t eaten in days
