2020 Mahberet Prize in Poetry
How does it feel to be away from your home? What is it like to not have a home? How do we define what we call home in the first place? The 2020 Mahberet Prize in Poetry asked writers to explore these questions in an original poem on the theme of diaspora (Jewish or otherwise).
This Year's Judge
Natalie Lyalin
Natalie Lyalin is the author of Blood Makes Me Faint, but I Go for It (Ugly Duckling Presse 2014), Pink & Hot Pink Habitat (Coconut Books 2009), and the chapbooks, Try A Little Time Travel (Ugly Duckling Presse 2010) and Short Cloud (above / ground press 2019). She lives in Rhode Island.
This Year's Winner
Harry Levine
Harry Levine is a sophomore at Brown University. He is concentrating in Literary Arts, and lives with his parents in Baltimore, MD.
This Year's Runner Up
Belinda Hu
"I’m the one in pink in the photo. I’m a rising sophomore at Brown thinking about studying geography
who is now in North Carolina thinking about whether I should put cinnamon in oatmeal cookies."
The Winning Poem
Delray Beach or Boca Raton, but “Moonlight” was in Miami
A tan brown, a soft finish
dough into something else
Mom never made it from scratch but she never needed to
these were the real deal
she loved making them because it made us happy to have them at least available
faces of snowmen folded and punished by an oven
A convex
Gratuity
Fill in the spaces
where they need to go -
A montuno to talk about freedom, going to where it’s a little quieter, to where it’s more comfortable
Eddie Palmieri and his band say the mountains but I’m not sure
A line in a movie debating Valley Forge (Frog? Valley Frog?), a password to access a very important
document, a document you bake and squeeze some lemons onto, a document which helps you find at first
bifocals, then other things
“...we did a Cesium test.”
Cesium was super helpful for us to determine the 1954 hurricane, the last one, the one that we already
pretty much knew but used Cesium for fun, less as a tool, more for the implications
A gaze stares out, furious.
Why did you do that? What was that for?
What the hell? Get a grip.
“Are not you Israelites the same to me as the Cushites?” declares the LORD. “Did I not bring Israel up
from Egypt, the Philistines from Caphtor and the Arameans from Kir?”
I copied and pasted that from biblehub.com. (That’s the New International Version).
My brother’s name is Max
but I didn’t think of calling him Mad Max
It’s just Max in different tones
instead
I just got some Cleaning Formula from my grandmother
It was hers and now it is mine
I’ve never had a glasses cleaner before so it felt really good to be dirty and then have the option to get rid
of it
It was compliments of “SeaView Optical”
I have been to Florida once, but have not done anything consequential
There are many things I won’t ever get to see