Archive
The Curses
The curses were
pleated, language folded like dense
integuments of muscle, like the heart
tougher
to bite through than
any organ. “I like it because
it is bitter,” like a miner, turnip
pressed down
flesh insisting
lively through silt, no one would take that
shape, dwarf’s bulb bullet, unless resisting
being
nothing, growing
downward what’s possible, travel through
filth, earth, call it what you will, had your fill
knowing
dull gravity,
brown and ochre, cursing the mother
for always having to carve into her
to be.
Above ground,
easy leaves find themselves differently,
all furl and crinkle, like fans, flirtation’s
light sound—
banter, repair.
These dare health, but the accordion
expansion of the root, the curses, what do
they dare?
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Monica Raymond won the Castillo Prize in political theater for her play The Owl Girl, which is about two families in an unnamed Middle Eastern country who both have keys to the same house. She was a Jerome Fellow for 2008-09 at the Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis, among many other honors and awards. Her poetry has been published in the Colorado Review, the Iowa Review, and the Village Voice, and her work has been selected for publication by every pair of qarrtsiluni editors for ten issues in a row now (counting the upcoming Health issue).
Economies
This must happen
after death: the gold
out of the teeth,
liver broiled instantly,
but the loins smoked and saved
for the long journey.
This must happen:
the heart, wrought solid,
kept for a grinding stone,
crescents of nails
filed clean for amulets.
What falls down
must fall down, but we take
what we need.
We try to use
all that’s left.
Sinew for harp strings,
scrimshaw from the long bones,
retina caged
and set singing.
by Monica Raymond
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The Mystic in the Basement
for Ronald Rowe
He descends
with me
and carries
up
lumps of
cement
and splintery
old boards
and sweeps
the broken glass
the heaps,
the hoards
of half-finished,
never-read, never-sent
abandoned-
but-not
abandoned-
enough
the torn,
worn
frustrated
garments
fraying, moth-eaten—
when
that is done
he goes
for lunch
and writes
a poem
about the sapphire
crystalline sphere,
split
facings of
the star dome
the infinite
at Hi-Fi
Pizza over a
slice
then goes
to McDonald’s
for
coffee.
by Monica Raymond
Cheap Date
(Click on image to view at larger size.)
by Dick Freeman and Monica Raymond
Process notes
Dick:
The drawing proceeds from a new practice I described to Monica, noting, on black paper with white pencil, subjects of interest to me. This becoming an “impromtu,” semiotic document with a supportive, yet fragmented, dialogue leading toward a playful and gratifying result.
Monica:
We were sitting in the cafe in front of the Harvest Food Coop in Cambridge. Dick told me he had been doing sketches and notes on black paper with a white colored pencil. We were talking about another collaborative project I was involved in, and how that had gotten into a discussion of the relationship between science and poetry. When Dick went to the counter to get us hot chocolate, I wrote E=MC2 on the black page.
He came back and made another move. And so our collaboration continued, taking turns. Dick sometimes erased or blurred his own lines. He told me to feel free to erase his lines as well, but I really didn’t. And I wasn’t so sure I wanted him erasing mine!
Dick:
The conversation about the relationship between the sciences and the arts and some people’s inferences that these subjects are necessarily in insolvable conflict, impelled me to tell Monica, during pauses from sketching, about my 20-something-year argument with a friend and mentor who had actually passed away quite early in the very respectful discussion. I had imagined most the argument for both of us. My friend’s position had been that “science and technology are destroying the world because, unlike art which puts things together, science takes things apart.” He was in his early 60’s, a highly acclaimed painter and former art reviewer when our discussions began. I was an aesthetically ambitious, 20-something painter with very limited reading experience then. Still, I intuitively inferred that my friend’s belief was inaccurate. After many years of reading and reflection, I concluded that it is neither science nor technology that are destructive, these being only very sophisticated tools. Rather it is arrogance that leads to destruction.
Monica:
Gradually, we each added words, lines and smudges to the drawings. A happy moment for me was when Dick added little lights to what I thought I had drawn as a claw, turning it into a candelabra. We talked as we drew, about the way the drawing seemed to evoke the feeling of chalk on a blackboard, kids playing around after the professor is gone for the day.
Another for Jim
Harshly. Harshness that subsides to beauty
but not yet. Landscape
softened to torrent, wash of windshield wipers, wish
wash, blurring the bumpers and the bumper
stickers, bare trees spilling to action.
What it is to imagine atrocity. With clarity.
Shudders and stutters,
glazed eyes, loginess derived from antipsychotics.
What we think of
as madness actually side-effects of drugs
used to forestall it. Think
of this. Information, imagination, the relation
between.
Your taxes pay for war and torture in
El Salvador.
Here it gets thin, not what happens
horribly, but before
and after, how image soothes the gap,
maybe a rooster, shrieking berserk,
becomes a hand tearing the landscape, its
photo, torn paper. You went into this
further. Behind the techno-scrim, bright pilots
expose their weapons, you felt for what went on.
Under cloud cover. Then mad for good,
not numb in the gameshow eye. But nonstop
talk, breakneck drive.
by Monica Raymond
What the Echo Knows
Hiccups
as oratory—
why shouldn’t repetition
be the story
we learn most
from?
She was some
yes-man
girl, always
saying what she
had heard
him say
but by going
on, made it
her own
and her yes
es
sss
turned
to a
hiss
dakini
of
bliss
Then
serpents
were her lovers
by Monica Raymond
Inside Leviathan
But actually I didn’t take you far,
not far enough. I started to dream
we were clothed,
trying to make love. That time we crossed
the bridge at night, the lights white moths
to my myopic eyes, shimmering in aureoles
of blurred flutter,
I saw me push you off. I should
have pushed you
into something wetter, to that archaic
world
where knife-edge reds form, gleam
and tune the keyboards
of apartments to cathedrals, where globes
quicken to probes,
poignards that seem to pierce
the dark surface they ride on, that black
horse
latitude of luminescent jellyfish, where
bitter
sardine, small fry, those turned to dragons
by the press
of reflective scales, the dugong mermaids swim, all
plankton inside leviathan.
Pathetic Fallacy
We’d like to remind you
how built things arrive at collapse,
says the shed. The rust streaks
on my corrugated lid are not
meant
for beauty, though they are beautiful.
We’d like to remind you
how things close in, says the boxwood.
Behind the gate
almost we meet. We could close the man
and woman
and child in the house. In the station
wagon, vines
cry up through the rusted bottom
panel. A sedan
is best as a planter, says what’s
green. Say the sprouts
in the taupe-orange soil of the garden,
we are trim. We spill
over our tops like a fountain. It is
rare to live
among plants and stones, gray weathered
boards that gab.
Concrete has no words, that’s why
we adlib for it—
hearts and our names.
by Monica Raymond
Moth and Rat
Moth and rat
both gnawed holes in what was,
desperate appetite
that left
all garments holey. Moth and rat
knew no limit, would not
make a split
between
the dainty and the container
meant to contain it.
Sweat, blood,
cashmere, vicuña, alpaca,
fine Italian wool —
omnivorous and multicultural
were moth and rat.
If you would steel
yourself against incursion
tooth and claw, bore and bezel —
if you would live
as metal, robot skin
impervious to dust or fission,
well, you must find
that route alone.
Even bone’s permeable
and my skin
pitted with beings
trying to get out or in,
leaving their stingers, cursed,
blessed, in my flesh
till I am dressed
in the milkweed cloth
they have left me,
tit for tat:
sucking my sweetness
as I sucked the fat
dew and honey, the sap,
grass blades
where the sky showed through.
Filigree’s my map.
And what they did for me
I can do for you —
rat and moth, moth and rat.
by Monica Raymond
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