Jet Fuel Review
  • Home
  • About
    • Our Story
    • Masthead
  • Submit
    • Submission Guidelines
    • Submit Here
  • Features
  • Interviews
  • Book Reviews
  • Previous Issues
  • Blog
  • Contact
  • Issue #27 Spring 2024
    • Issue #27 Art Spring 2024 >
      • Kristina Erny Spring 2024
      • Luiza Maia Spring 2024
      • Christy Lee Rogers Spring 2024
      • Erika Lynet Salvador Spring 2024
      • Marsha Solomon Spring 2024
    • Issue #27 Poetry Spring 2024 >
      • Terry Belew Spring 2024
      • Dustin Brookshire​ & Diamond Forde Spring 2024 Spring 2024
      • Dustin Brookshire​ & Caridad Moro-Gronlier Spring 2024 Spring 2024
      • Charlie Coleman Spring 2024
      • Isabelle Doyle Spring 2024
      • Reyzl Grace Spring 2024
      • Kelly Gray Spring 2024
      • Meredith Herndon Spring 2024
      • Mina Khan Spring 2024
      • Anoushka Kumar Spring 2024
      • Cate Latimer Spring 2024
      • BEE LB Spring 2024
      • Grace Marie Liu​ Spring 2024
      • Sarah Mills Spring 2024
      • Faisal Mohyuddin 2024
      • Marcus Myers Spring 2024
      • Mike Puican Spring 2024
      • Sarah Sorensen Spring 2024
      • Lynne Thompson Spring 2024
      • Natalie Tombasco Spring 2024
      • Alexandra van de Kamp Spring 2024
      • Donna Vorreyer Spring 2024
    • Fiction #27 Spring 2024 >
      • Bryan Betancur Spring 2024
      • Karen George Spring 2024
      • Raja'a Khalid Spring 2024
      • Riley Manning Spring 2024
      • Adina Polatsek Spring 2024
      • Beth Sherman Spring 2024
    • Nonfiction #27 Spring 2024 >
      • Liza Olson Spring 2024
  • Issue #28 Fall 2024
    • Issue #28 Art Fall 2024 >
      • Eric Calloway Fall 2024
      • Matthew Fertel Fall 2024
      • JooLee Kang Fall 2024
      • Jian Kim Fall 2024
      • Robb Kunz Fall 2024
      • Sean Layh Fall 2024
    • Issue #28 Poetry Fall 2024 >
      • Jodi Balas Fall 2024
      • Clayre Benzadón Fall 2024
      • Catherine Broadwall Fall 2024
      • Sara Burge Fall 2024
      • Judith Chalmer Fall 2024
      • Stephanie Choi Fall 2024
      • Sarah Jack Fall 2024
      • Jen Karetnick Fall 2024
      • Ae Hee Lee Fall 2024
      • Svetlana Litvinchuk Fall 2024
      • Mary Lou Buschi Fall 2024
      • Angie Macri Fall 2024
      • Gary McDowell Fall 2024
      • Sam Moe Fall 2024
      • Camille Newsom Fall 2024
      • Elizabeth O'Connell- Thompson Fall 2024
      • Olatunde Osinaike Fall 2024
      • Jessica Pierce Fall 2024
      • Diane Raptosh Fall 2024
      • Isaac Richards Fall 2024
      • Robyn Schelenz Fall 2024
      • Christopher Shipman Fall 2024
      • Alex Tretbar Fall 2024
      • Ruth Williams Fall 2024
      • Shannon K. Winston Fall 2024
      • Wendy Wisner Fall 2024
      • Anne Gerard Fall 2024
    • Issue #28 Fiction Fall 2024 >
      • J​oe Baumann Fall 2024
      • ​Morganne Howell Fall 2024
      • Matt Paczkowski Fall 2024
      • Ryan Peed Fall 2024
      • Gabriella Pitts Fall 2024
      • James Sullivan Fall 2024
  • Issue #29 Spring 2025
    • Issue #29 Art Spring 2025 >
      • Irina Greciuhina Spring 2025
      • Jesse Howard Spring 2025
      • Paul Simmons Spring 2025
      • Marsha Solomon Spring 2025
      • Elzbieta Zdunek Spring 2025
      • Na Yoon Amelia Cha-Ryu Spring 2025
    • Issue #29 Poetry Spring 2025 >
      • Deborah Bacharach Spring 2025
      • Diego Báez Spring 2025
      • Jaswinder Bolina Spring 2025
      • ​Ash Bowen Spring 2025
      • Christian J. Collier Spring 2025
      • ​Shou Jie Eng Spring 2025
      • Sara Fitzpatrick Spring 2025
      • Matthew Gilbert Spring 2025
      • Tammy C. Greenwood Spring 2025
      • Alejandra Hernández ​Spring 2025
      • Ben Kline ​Spring 2025
      • ​David Moolten Spring 2025
      • ​Tamer Mostafa Spring 2025
      • ​Rongfei Mu Spring 2025
      • Cynthia Neely Spring 2025
      • Pablo Otavalo Spring 2025
      • ​Bleah Patterson Spring 2025
      • ​M.A. Scott Spring 2025
      • ​Liam Strong ​ Spring 2025
      • Alexandra van de Kamp Spring 2025
      • ​Cassandra Whitaker Spring 2025
      • Angelique Zobitz Spring 2025
    • Issue #29 Fiction Spring 2025 >
      • Vanessa Blakeslee Spring 2025
      • K. J. Coyle Spring 2025
      • Meredith MacLeod Davidson Spring 2025
      • Jessica Mosher Spring 2025
    • Issue #29 Nonfiction Spring 2025 >
      • JM Huscher Spring 2025
      • Qurrat ul Ain Raza Abbas Spring 2025

Elizabeth-Astrid Powell

Voodoo Acid Imprint           


Once, on acid, your best guy friend looked
so deeply into your opened pupils
what he said pin-stuck in you--
 
that prediction-predilection
you keep living out, his long-ago
psychedelic hypnosis,
 
he opened you up like a study bible
inscribed his proverb so deeply
in your Chaka-khan charka
you became a living Psalter worthy of R & B--
 
twenty years later it’s all you can do
to keep your soft summer dresses on
when you think of him.
 
Maybe love is a vessel for a prophecy
you can’t put down for fear of breaking.
 
One June evening, you may remember
the sweet smell of clover in the field
 
where you lay, while he straddled you laughing,
holding down your arms-- not with meanness.
 
Smelling of his garage band, blue aluminum and grass,
he sang the zigzag brain static of constant lovemaking
into your body’s Victor Victrola
 
imprinting your mnemonic for good sex--
his old space at your lookout point
 
where whatever it was he said is now the water
from which your whole impossible life flows.




REGARDING MY AUTOPSY

I
 
 
When they pronounced me DOA, the glass doors
 
of the hospital opened for me like jaws,
 
as they rolled me to the morgue. I hovered
 
above the gurney sweet as marijuana smoke.
 
It was so black, the white sheet flimsy as a veil, slipping off me.
 
The spirit’s permanent stutter, trying to get the unsaid out into the reddening sky.
 
The Velcro pull of soul from body--
 
the diving into darkness so chill it froze each query
 
at its birth--  I thought where is my car? Where are my children?
 
The question was--
 
something I had to remember.
 
The glass doors swishing open and shut like a thresher.
 
I kept forgetting--
 
how did I die?
 
II
 
On the clipboard. Other notes.
 
Item: One wallet, black, one hundred and twenty two dollars
 
Item: A gold wedding band, inscription 9/7/83
 
Item: one set of keys
 
Item: one roll of peppermint lifesavers, unopened
 
Item: Ray Ban aviator sunglasses, left side bent
 
Items: a beige v-neck sweater (ripped in front), tan khakis, blue button-down shirt (buttons missing), burgundy oxford shoes, brown leather belt
 
Above the Medical Examiner’s table, a sign in Latin--
 
Hic locus est ubi mors gaudet succurrere vitae--
 
This is the place where Death rejoices to teach those who live.
 
Terrible angels dream-hover taking notes: 
 
Desires 420 grams, ambitions 301 grams.
 
State of Grace: Limbo.
 
But the examiner’s scalpel is sharper
 
than the divinest quill.
 
 
III
 
Can you hear me?
 
            Yes. I can hear you.
 
Tell me what the report says.
 
            It says: Your heart weighs 290 grams. It says: congestive heart failure.
 
Are you sure? I see you in a summer field, Vermont a long time ago.
 
            Yes, I’m sure. Your heart was unsure.
 
I can smell the top of your infant head.
 
            Maybe you’re death-dreaming.
 
I think you were my daughter. Didn’t teach you how to drive?
 
            That’s what I’m saying.
 
 
IV
 
Then I owe you an apology.
 
I’ m not sorry for my life…but I’m sorry for something,
 
The other corpses in the morgue still on their stretchers,
 
mock me with their decorous stillness, their hospital tubes and plastics,
 
the whites of their eyes have turned hen’s egg brown.
 
The terrible angels wield their long tweezers,
 
Strange extractors. I am weary--
 
the sensation I once had--
 
unable to stop, the toboggan threshing me down the hill--
 
please, if you are my daughter, conjure that which was once me
 
putting a soft blanket over you at midnight.
 
I ‘ve left you nothing but narrative to appease your afflictions--
 
 
 


CONDOLENCE IN CEMENT


Make your partings complete.
Don’t roll them over and over
 
like a worry stone, until your hands are dry and cut,
your mind wave-worn as a cliff hit by incoming tides.
 
What’s goodbye but a prayer for releasing
what has passed, as flowers send pollen into the wind?
 
Let your goodbyes be direct and clean as a master’s
sketch, brush strokes that finally get the flower’s
 
essence—art so true even we will believe
those marks on paper bloomed a flower.
 
Let it all be complete,
don’t try to reverse what’s been undone
 
with your thought’s bulldozer. Make way –
even the future can’t retrieve what’s left behind,
 
the sealing cement poured in the gap:
More adamant than stone.




EPILOGUE


This reckless daughter
            kept using I statements
You were turning off
 
the auditorium lights were really
headlights        shattering         sound of the switch               
brake   ignition   ditch
 
            The stage was an abandoned car wreck
The scene stuttering                 what happened?
           
Sirens wailed the cops’ arrival—I was using I
statements to call 911,              but they merely inquired
about stage direction, location,
character motivation.
 
They advised all ghosts
exit the ramp                        or the trick door stage right
 
But the ghosts were under union
contract            stagehands delivering scripts
to the unconscious       the way
drama always works---
 
you’re unaware of something
you know, but walk toward it
 
because secrets are symmetrical,
yellowheadlights          wintershatter   
                        hysterical daffodils waving
early spring                 ActOneTwoThree
come and gone like lust, there must be
 
a de-briefing where you try
            talking me down from the stage
as if you talked another kind of actress from a ledge,
            feeling of falling out                that window
 
until                 the waking
older men, legs in aisle            round heads                 moons             light sleep
            someone should Supreme Court scream         Fire                
in this theater they never do.               
I had to live the truth                even if it ruined the play                     
            Still      that one                        non-metaphoric light
on you.            Spotlight          searchlight      
            coplight           foresight
            it is truth
 
or some version of avoiding it,
            compelled like a sex-addict-badass-poet-pothead
bad childhood              car-wrecked dead businessman
            I kept using I statements
 
you doing what didn’t work
over and over
as if
 
welding a car from the staged smashup
headlights        sirens               moons             balconies
            I dropped to my knees, but no audience
heard—only the sleeping men and
            my soliloquy of me
passing like roadside trees
            Cherryblossomsnow
bridge down                road out                       oil slick
 
For our acting technique                      we fooled ourselves,
asking the same things
            those ghosts had,
ghosts that looked                   like us.
 
under the grave of the symphony pit,
invisible           music   to which we danced to
 
made-up, costumed,                 I entered the secret
with a key, banged on it with authority--
            as if we weren’t invisible
 
a dialogue tag              for a dog tag
you      tried to put on the directional signals               the emergency
                                                                                    light     on/off/on/off
 
You said: Come on say it already,
before you hemorrhage at the scene



--
Elizabeth A. I. Powell is the author of The Republic of Self a New Issue First Book Prize winner, selected by C.K. Williams. Her second book Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter: Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances won the Robert Dana Prize in poetry, chosen by Maureen Seaton, and will be published by Anhinga Press in 2016. Her work has appeared in the Pushcart Prize Anthology 2013, as well as Alaska Quarterly Review, Barrow Street, Black Warrior Review, Ecotone, Harvard Review, Handsome, Hobart, Indiana Review, Missouri Review, Mississippi Review, Slope, Sugarhouse Review, Ploughshares, Post Road, and elsewhere. She is Editor of Green Mountains Review, and Associate Professor of Writing and Literature at Johnson State College. She also serves on the faculty of the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska-Omaha and the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing and Publishing.

    Get updates from jet fuel review

Subscribe to Newsletter
© COPYRIGHT 2019. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
  • Home
  • About
    • Our Story
    • Masthead
  • Submit
    • Submission Guidelines
    • Submit Here
  • Features
  • Interviews
  • Book Reviews
  • Previous Issues
  • Blog
  • Contact
  • Issue #27 Spring 2024
    • Issue #27 Art Spring 2024 >
      • Kristina Erny Spring 2024
      • Luiza Maia Spring 2024
      • Christy Lee Rogers Spring 2024
      • Erika Lynet Salvador Spring 2024
      • Marsha Solomon Spring 2024
    • Issue #27 Poetry Spring 2024 >
      • Terry Belew Spring 2024
      • Dustin Brookshire​ & Diamond Forde Spring 2024 Spring 2024
      • Dustin Brookshire​ & Caridad Moro-Gronlier Spring 2024 Spring 2024
      • Charlie Coleman Spring 2024
      • Isabelle Doyle Spring 2024
      • Reyzl Grace Spring 2024
      • Kelly Gray Spring 2024
      • Meredith Herndon Spring 2024
      • Mina Khan Spring 2024
      • Anoushka Kumar Spring 2024
      • Cate Latimer Spring 2024
      • BEE LB Spring 2024
      • Grace Marie Liu​ Spring 2024
      • Sarah Mills Spring 2024
      • Faisal Mohyuddin 2024
      • Marcus Myers Spring 2024
      • Mike Puican Spring 2024
      • Sarah Sorensen Spring 2024
      • Lynne Thompson Spring 2024
      • Natalie Tombasco Spring 2024
      • Alexandra van de Kamp Spring 2024
      • Donna Vorreyer Spring 2024
    • Fiction #27 Spring 2024 >
      • Bryan Betancur Spring 2024
      • Karen George Spring 2024
      • Raja'a Khalid Spring 2024
      • Riley Manning Spring 2024
      • Adina Polatsek Spring 2024
      • Beth Sherman Spring 2024
    • Nonfiction #27 Spring 2024 >
      • Liza Olson Spring 2024
  • Issue #28 Fall 2024
    • Issue #28 Art Fall 2024 >
      • Eric Calloway Fall 2024
      • Matthew Fertel Fall 2024
      • JooLee Kang Fall 2024
      • Jian Kim Fall 2024
      • Robb Kunz Fall 2024
      • Sean Layh Fall 2024
    • Issue #28 Poetry Fall 2024 >
      • Jodi Balas Fall 2024
      • Clayre Benzadón Fall 2024
      • Catherine Broadwall Fall 2024
      • Sara Burge Fall 2024
      • Judith Chalmer Fall 2024
      • Stephanie Choi Fall 2024
      • Sarah Jack Fall 2024
      • Jen Karetnick Fall 2024
      • Ae Hee Lee Fall 2024
      • Svetlana Litvinchuk Fall 2024
      • Mary Lou Buschi Fall 2024
      • Angie Macri Fall 2024
      • Gary McDowell Fall 2024
      • Sam Moe Fall 2024
      • Camille Newsom Fall 2024
      • Elizabeth O'Connell- Thompson Fall 2024
      • Olatunde Osinaike Fall 2024
      • Jessica Pierce Fall 2024
      • Diane Raptosh Fall 2024
      • Isaac Richards Fall 2024
      • Robyn Schelenz Fall 2024
      • Christopher Shipman Fall 2024
      • Alex Tretbar Fall 2024
      • Ruth Williams Fall 2024
      • Shannon K. Winston Fall 2024
      • Wendy Wisner Fall 2024
      • Anne Gerard Fall 2024
    • Issue #28 Fiction Fall 2024 >
      • J​oe Baumann Fall 2024
      • ​Morganne Howell Fall 2024
      • Matt Paczkowski Fall 2024
      • Ryan Peed Fall 2024
      • Gabriella Pitts Fall 2024
      • James Sullivan Fall 2024
  • Issue #29 Spring 2025
    • Issue #29 Art Spring 2025 >
      • Irina Greciuhina Spring 2025
      • Jesse Howard Spring 2025
      • Paul Simmons Spring 2025
      • Marsha Solomon Spring 2025
      • Elzbieta Zdunek Spring 2025
      • Na Yoon Amelia Cha-Ryu Spring 2025
    • Issue #29 Poetry Spring 2025 >
      • Deborah Bacharach Spring 2025
      • Diego Báez Spring 2025
      • Jaswinder Bolina Spring 2025
      • ​Ash Bowen Spring 2025
      • Christian J. Collier Spring 2025
      • ​Shou Jie Eng Spring 2025
      • Sara Fitzpatrick Spring 2025
      • Matthew Gilbert Spring 2025
      • Tammy C. Greenwood Spring 2025
      • Alejandra Hernández ​Spring 2025
      • Ben Kline ​Spring 2025
      • ​David Moolten Spring 2025
      • ​Tamer Mostafa Spring 2025
      • ​Rongfei Mu Spring 2025
      • Cynthia Neely Spring 2025
      • Pablo Otavalo Spring 2025
      • ​Bleah Patterson Spring 2025
      • ​M.A. Scott Spring 2025
      • ​Liam Strong ​ Spring 2025
      • Alexandra van de Kamp Spring 2025
      • ​Cassandra Whitaker Spring 2025
      • Angelique Zobitz Spring 2025
    • Issue #29 Fiction Spring 2025 >
      • Vanessa Blakeslee Spring 2025
      • K. J. Coyle Spring 2025
      • Meredith MacLeod Davidson Spring 2025
      • Jessica Mosher Spring 2025
    • Issue #29 Nonfiction Spring 2025 >
      • JM Huscher Spring 2025
      • Qurrat ul Ain Raza Abbas Spring 2025