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  • Issue 22 Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Art Fall 2021 >
      • Bonnie Severien Fall 2021
      • Camilla Taylor Fall 2021
      • Guilherme Bergamini Fall 2021
      • Emanuela Iorga Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Poetry Fall 2021 >
      • Maureen Alsop Fall 2021
      • Annah Browning Fall 2021
      • Romana Iorga Fall 2021
      • Natalie Hampton Fall 2021
      • Sherine Gilmour Fall 2021
      • Adam Day Fall 2021
      • Amanda Auchter Fall 2021
      • Adam Tavel Fall 2021
      • Sara Moore Fall 2021
      • Karen Rigby Fall 2021
      • Daniel Zhang Fall 2021
      • Erika Lutzner Fall 2021
      • Kindall Fredricks Fall 2021
      • Cin Salach Fall 2021
      • Andrew Zawacki Fall 2021
      • Micah Ruelle Fall 2021
      • Rachel Stempel Fall 2021
      • Haley Wooning Fall 2021
      • Rikki Santer Fall 2021
      • Evy Shen Fall 2021
      • Suzanne Frischkorn Fall 2021
      • Danielle Rose Fall 2021
      • Eric Burgoyne Fall 2021
      • John Cullen Fall 2021
      • Maureen Seaton Fall 2021
      • Hannah Stephens Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Nonfiction Fall 2021 >
      • Kevin Grauke Fall 2021
      • Courtney Justus Fall 2021
      • Amy Nicholson Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Fiction Fall 2021 >
      • Tina Jenkins Bell Fall 2021
      • David Obuchowski Fall 2021
      • Thomas Misuraca Fall 2021
      • Aiden Baker Fall 2021
      • Jenny Magnus Fall 2021
  • Issue 23 Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Art Spring 2022 >
      • Jonathan Kvassay Spring 2022
      • Karyna McGlynn Spring 2022
      • Andrea Kowch Spring 2022
      • Layla Garcia-Torres Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Poetry Spring 2022 >
      • Robin Gow Spring 2022
      • T.D. Walker Spring 2022
      • Jen Schalliol Huang Spring 2022
      • Yvonne Zipter Spring 2022
      • Carrie McGath Spring 2022
      • Lupita Eyde-Tucker Spring 2022
      • Susan L. Leary Spring 2022
      • Kate Sweeney Spring 2022
      • Rita Mookerjee Spring 2022
      • Erin Carlyle Spring 2022
      • Cori Bratty-Rudd Spring 2022
      • Jen Karetnick Spring 2022
      • Meghan Sterling Spring 2022
      • Lorelei Bacht Spring 2022
      • Michael Passafiume Spring 2022
      • Jeannine Hall Gailey Spring 2022
      • Phil Goldstein Spring 2022
      • Michael Mingo Spring 2022
      • Angie Macri Spring 2022
      • Martha Silano Spring 2022
      • Vismai Rao Spring 2022
      • Anna Laura Reeve Spring 2022
      • Jenny Irish Spring 2022
      • Marek Kulig Spring 2022
      • Jami Macarty Spring 2022
      • Sarah A. Rae Spring 2022
      • Brittney Corrigan Spring 2022
      • Callista Buchen Spring 2022
      • Issam Zineh Spring 2022
      • MICHAEL CHANG Spring 2022
      • henry 7. reneau, jr. Spring 2022
      • Leah Umansky Spring 2022
      • Cody Beck Spring 2022
      • Danyal Kim Spring 2022
      • Rachel DeWoskin Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Fiction Spring 2022 >
      • Melissa Boberg Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Nonfiction Spring 2022 >
      • Srinaath Perangur Spring 2022
      • Audrey T. Carroll Spring 2022
  • Issue #24 Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Art Fall 2022 >
      • Marsha Solomon Fall 2022
      • Edward Lee Fall 2022
      • Harryette Mullen Fall 2022
      • Jezzelle Kellam Fall 2022
      • Irina Greciuhina Fall 2022
      • Natalie Christensen Fall 2022
      • Mark Yale Harris Fall 2022
      • Amy Nelder Fall 2022
      • Bette Ridgeway Fall 2022
      • Ursula Sokolowska Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Poetry Fall 2022 >
      • William Stobb Fall 2022
      • e Fall 2022
      • Stefanie Kirby Fall 2022
      • Lisa Ampleman Fall 2022
      • Will Cordeiro Fall 2022
      • Jesica Davis Fall 2022
      • Peter O'Donovan Fall 2022
      • Mackenzie Carignan Fall 2022
      • Jason Fraley Fall 2022
      • Barbara Saunier Fall 2022
      • Chad Weeden Fall 2022
      • Nick Rattner Fall 2022
      • Cynthia Schwartzberg Edlow Fall 2022
      • Summer J. Hart Fall 2022
      • Daniel Suá​rez Fall 2022
      • Sara Kearns Fall 2022
      • Millicent Borges Accardi Fall 2022
      • Liz Robbins Fall 2022
      • john compton Fall 2022
      • Esther Sadoff Fall 2022
      • Whitney Koo Fall 2022
      • W. J. Lofton Fall 2022
      • Rachel Reynolds Fall 2022
      • Kimberly Ann Priest Fall 2022
      • Annie Przypyszny Fall 2022
      • Konstantin Kulakov Fall 2022
      • Nellie Cox Fall 2022
      • Jennifer Martelli Fall 2022
      • SM Stubbs Fall 2022
      • Joshua Bird Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Fiction Fall 2022 >
      • Otis Fuqua Fall 2022
      • Hannah Harlow Fall 2022
      • Natalia Nebel Fall 2022
      • Kate Maxwell Fall 2022
      • Helena Pantsis Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Nonfiction Fall 2022 >
      • Courtney Ludwick Fall 2022
      • Anna Oberg Fall 2022
      • Acadia Currah Fall 2022

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.

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  • Home
  • About
    • Our Story
    • Masthead
  • Submit
    • Submission Guidelines
    • Submit Here
  • Features
  • Interviews
  • Book Reviews
  • Previous Issues
  • Blog
  • Contact
  • Issue 22 Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Art Fall 2021 >
      • Bonnie Severien Fall 2021
      • Camilla Taylor Fall 2021
      • Guilherme Bergamini Fall 2021
      • Emanuela Iorga Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Poetry Fall 2021 >
      • Maureen Alsop Fall 2021
      • Annah Browning Fall 2021
      • Romana Iorga Fall 2021
      • Natalie Hampton Fall 2021
      • Sherine Gilmour Fall 2021
      • Adam Day Fall 2021
      • Amanda Auchter Fall 2021
      • Adam Tavel Fall 2021
      • Sara Moore Fall 2021
      • Karen Rigby Fall 2021
      • Daniel Zhang Fall 2021
      • Erika Lutzner Fall 2021
      • Kindall Fredricks Fall 2021
      • Cin Salach Fall 2021
      • Andrew Zawacki Fall 2021
      • Micah Ruelle Fall 2021
      • Rachel Stempel Fall 2021
      • Haley Wooning Fall 2021
      • Rikki Santer Fall 2021
      • Evy Shen Fall 2021
      • Suzanne Frischkorn Fall 2021
      • Danielle Rose Fall 2021
      • Eric Burgoyne Fall 2021
      • John Cullen Fall 2021
      • Maureen Seaton Fall 2021
      • Hannah Stephens Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Nonfiction Fall 2021 >
      • Kevin Grauke Fall 2021
      • Courtney Justus Fall 2021
      • Amy Nicholson Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Fiction Fall 2021 >
      • Tina Jenkins Bell Fall 2021
      • David Obuchowski Fall 2021
      • Thomas Misuraca Fall 2021
      • Aiden Baker Fall 2021
      • Jenny Magnus Fall 2021
  • Issue 23 Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Art Spring 2022 >
      • Jonathan Kvassay Spring 2022
      • Karyna McGlynn Spring 2022
      • Andrea Kowch Spring 2022
      • Layla Garcia-Torres Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Poetry Spring 2022 >
      • Robin Gow Spring 2022
      • T.D. Walker Spring 2022
      • Jen Schalliol Huang Spring 2022
      • Yvonne Zipter Spring 2022
      • Carrie McGath Spring 2022
      • Lupita Eyde-Tucker Spring 2022
      • Susan L. Leary Spring 2022
      • Kate Sweeney Spring 2022
      • Rita Mookerjee Spring 2022
      • Erin Carlyle Spring 2022
      • Cori Bratty-Rudd Spring 2022
      • Jen Karetnick Spring 2022
      • Meghan Sterling Spring 2022
      • Lorelei Bacht Spring 2022
      • Michael Passafiume Spring 2022
      • Jeannine Hall Gailey Spring 2022
      • Phil Goldstein Spring 2022
      • Michael Mingo Spring 2022
      • Angie Macri Spring 2022
      • Martha Silano Spring 2022
      • Vismai Rao Spring 2022
      • Anna Laura Reeve Spring 2022
      • Jenny Irish Spring 2022
      • Marek Kulig Spring 2022
      • Jami Macarty Spring 2022
      • Sarah A. Rae Spring 2022
      • Brittney Corrigan Spring 2022
      • Callista Buchen Spring 2022
      • Issam Zineh Spring 2022
      • MICHAEL CHANG Spring 2022
      • henry 7. reneau, jr. Spring 2022
      • Leah Umansky Spring 2022
      • Cody Beck Spring 2022
      • Danyal Kim Spring 2022
      • Rachel DeWoskin Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Fiction Spring 2022 >
      • Melissa Boberg Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Nonfiction Spring 2022 >
      • Srinaath Perangur Spring 2022
      • Audrey T. Carroll Spring 2022
  • Issue #24 Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Art Fall 2022 >
      • Marsha Solomon Fall 2022
      • Edward Lee Fall 2022
      • Harryette Mullen Fall 2022
      • Jezzelle Kellam Fall 2022
      • Irina Greciuhina Fall 2022
      • Natalie Christensen Fall 2022
      • Mark Yale Harris Fall 2022
      • Amy Nelder Fall 2022
      • Bette Ridgeway Fall 2022
      • Ursula Sokolowska Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Poetry Fall 2022 >
      • William Stobb Fall 2022
      • e Fall 2022
      • Stefanie Kirby Fall 2022
      • Lisa Ampleman Fall 2022
      • Will Cordeiro Fall 2022
      • Jesica Davis Fall 2022
      • Peter O'Donovan Fall 2022
      • Mackenzie Carignan Fall 2022
      • Jason Fraley Fall 2022
      • Barbara Saunier Fall 2022
      • Chad Weeden Fall 2022
      • Nick Rattner Fall 2022
      • Cynthia Schwartzberg Edlow Fall 2022
      • Summer J. Hart Fall 2022
      • Daniel Suá​rez Fall 2022
      • Sara Kearns Fall 2022
      • Millicent Borges Accardi Fall 2022
      • Liz Robbins Fall 2022
      • john compton Fall 2022
      • Esther Sadoff Fall 2022
      • Whitney Koo Fall 2022
      • W. J. Lofton Fall 2022
      • Rachel Reynolds Fall 2022
      • Kimberly Ann Priest Fall 2022
      • Annie Przypyszny Fall 2022
      • Konstantin Kulakov Fall 2022
      • Nellie Cox Fall 2022
      • Jennifer Martelli Fall 2022
      • SM Stubbs Fall 2022
      • Joshua Bird Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Fiction Fall 2022 >
      • Otis Fuqua Fall 2022
      • Hannah Harlow Fall 2022
      • Natalia Nebel Fall 2022
      • Kate Maxwell Fall 2022
      • Helena Pantsis Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Nonfiction Fall 2022 >
      • Courtney Ludwick Fall 2022
      • Anna Oberg Fall 2022
      • Acadia Currah Fall 2022