E.E. Cummings Prize, selected by Susan Donnelly
After the Fire
I have been down in the cellar after the fire
where the sheets of stained glass—bottle green, blue, mottled rose—
meant to be cut into petals, madonna’s robes
have been shattered into a kaleidoscope where soot
plays the black line of leadings, where broken things are at home.
Everything you forgot you had is here, melted and crumbling:
your father’s LPs, stern and unscratchable, Mozart and Mahler
burned now to dervish discs, a potato chip warp
volcanic, insouciant and alien, going round and round
a Moebius turntable of time with no exquisite sound.
The spirits who live in this cellar are tabloid gods,
gods of the quick escape, star transformation,
makeover, car crash, phoenix resurrection—
alchemist asleep with his head on the roc’s egg, modeled marble,
while metals bubble and slurp, child of the Bunsen burner.
Every minute was like this, but you denied it—
denied your explosive song, your cannonball vault from the stars,
denied your umbilical flare, that choir of burned mouths—
how you, like fire, roared through the house,
tore it open, changing everything.
Monica Raymond writes poems, plays, librettos, lyrics and sometimes prose from an old house in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A MacDowell Colony Fellow, Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow, Swan Fellow (Vermont Studio Center), and Playwrights’ Center Jerome Fellow, Raymond has taught writing and interdisciplinary arts at Harvard, CUNY, and the Boston Museum School.