Amy Lowell Prize Honorable Mention, selected by Doug Holder and Denise Provost
Monica Raymond writes poems, plays, and sometimes prose from an old house in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her magical realist play, THE OWL GIRL won the Jewish Play Project 2015 Boston and was a finalist in JPP’s national competition. OWL GIRL also won the Peacewriting Award, Castillo Theater prize for political theater, Clauder Gold Medal, and was nominated for the Susan Smith Blackburn Award (for the best play in English written by a woman). A TO Z, which follows the fraught relationship of two women through “forty years of US history and all the letters of the alphabet” received the Ruby Lloyd Apsey Award for best play about race/ethnicity. Raymond’s short opera, PAPER OR PLASTIC (music Charles Turner) was part of the American Repertory Theater’s Outside the Box Festival. Her short musical, GINA AND CHRISTINA, (music Anthony Uva) was performed at the Lincoln Center Library (NYC). Raymond’s plays have been produced or developed by Portland Stage (ME), Virago Theater (Oakland), Cleveland Public Theater, University of Utah, Kennedy Center (DC), Great Plains Theater Conference (Omaha), Castillo Theater (NYC), Golden Thread (San Francisco), The Internationalists (NYC), and have been published by Dramatic Publishing, Applause, McFarland, and Smith and Kraus. A Swan Fellow at the Vermont Studio Center, MacDowell Colony Fellow, Massachusetts Cultural Cultural Council Fellow, and Playwrights’ Center Jerome Fellow, she has taught writing and interdisciplinary arts at CUNY, Harvard and the Boston Museum School.
JERUSALEM
after Psalm 48
It's true, I used to live in Jerusalem,
with its cracked mud, its ful and scent of bay,
smoke rising from the charred plinths—
such barbecue! They knew how to celebrate me,
those stripling priests, burnished with slaughter,
bleary at dawn, their prayer shawls speckled with blood
as if they'd been up all night studying, run a hard race.
And it made sense then—maybe—for the psalmist to tell you
to engrave on your heart the temples of Jerusalem—
the alleys and cafes where four boys in kippot
are drinking Coke and singing along to Hey Jude—
the only English they know. And deeper still, in the bowels of the Old City
a Palestinian woman offers hummus, without a word, shoves it on the counter.
The best hummus. And everyone sticks their secrets through a crack in the wall.
Tissues for a hundred allergies. "Tissue? I don't even know you!"
Borscht belt and baggage and bereshit—honey, are you kidding?
Do you think that I still live in Jerusalem?
Always I was the King of Forbidding, but now even for me,
there's too much forbidding in Jerusalem.
Those guards at the Dome of the Rock, men in shtreimels descending
like black raptors on the women at the wall.
No, I no longer live in Jerusalem.
I'm stowed in steerage, stickers on my duffle—Marrakesh, London, Shanghai.
I live—yes, where do I live? I'm like the wandering jew
its pale green and purple leaves in a Victorian parlor
filling one window and then the next, refusing to be trained
looking out at the landscape of stockyards and skyscrapers
in time that I set rolling, that keeps on rolling...
I like New York, where echoes of Marxist quarrels
still float in clouds above the dairy cafeterias.
Or Vilna, where Yids are once again inventing Yiddish.
Or Santa Cruz, where the witch girls take mikvahs in the salt ocean,
under the prescient stars who pierce their faith
like a tattered garment in which to greet Elijah
when he comes to sip invisibly on Pesach.
Wherever I go, I'm like a pot on the fire
I know any moment can easily be tipped over,
my contents spilled on the coals, soup ahiss—
that cloud of steam that once shielded the Israelites
now that cloud of steam frays in strands—
just that fragile—the Cossacks are coming, grab the baby and the purse!
Don't you have a great aunt who lives in America?
I am the tallit packed in mothballs so long
they wore it away, a tapestry of holes,
a tapestry of windows through which you see clearly
the windows of the train that's taking us where, exactly?
Maybe it's not too late to travel like pollen
to smear into creation, submerge in the stuff I once made.
Diaspora means disperse, become one with the fibers of air...
How could I live in one place?
Mama Physics, Papa Astronomy, I had to travel—
I had to be faithless and rootless, to come into my next turning.
Slowly the sun takes me, the sun I once made!
Indignant and then humbled, a mumbling schlepper,
I walk to the edge of the city, my mind and heart
already filling with holes. With windows. I put out my thumb on the road.