Two Poems by Elizabeth Powell

THE GIRL FROM IPANEMA

Walked up to me all the way
from Brazil to serenade my childhood,
all day it was João Gilberto and bossa nova,
the samba sang only to me, no one else.
Yet, a voice like my mother’s began to sing:
How can he tell her he loves her?
The trumpet petitioning the afternoon
for mercy. And then, the promise:
She looks straight ahead not at him.
My toes in the cold New York Atlantic,
blender-making music on Fire Island,
my father’s long coffee colored fingers,
smelling of limes. The grown ups fading
into the afternoon’s vanishing line. I dragged
the red wagon down the sandy lane, where I walked,
mixture of flower and mermaid bossa
like Gilberto and Getz’s trumpet
thump toward the year of my undoing,
inside the high notes of my long hair
tangling off-key in beach wind and radio sounds.
The song sang of the one chord
Gilberto had played over and over
locked in his bathroom, that year
when everything was changing. How
to understand the new sound of beauty:
How a young girl disappeared into an idea
of a person no one can have.

STALKING ME ONOMATOPOETICALLY

I sought a restraining order against the sociopathic
poem that kept pounding on the door of my mind at four a.m.,
rousing me with a slap on the face with its metaphysics
of sick lust and panic. The order was dated March 1, 2016.
A Thursday. Rainy. The socio-poem smelled of Paco Rabonne,
was devilishly handsome, so elegant, so English-lyrically,
well-anthologized and attractive, seemed to have a form
that suggested well-bred content, an understanding of stanzaic
architecture, and deep image. Yet, this poem I loved had once tried
to stab Dorothy Parker at a dinner party. He had claimed
to have French kissed Helen Vendler and Allen Ginsberg.
How could I rationalize or reconcile my love for the poem?
On therapeutic advice I sought the restraining order
against the poem because it couldn’t contain itself, pushed me
down with a conceit stronger than my fragile couplets, how
it leaked anaphora like anti-freeze, bluish over the page
and into my life uninvited, thinking it knew me
better than I knew myself. The poem’s arguments were convincing
on the surface of its repeating lines and rhyme scheme,
but it was all fanciful diversion. A lie. All through the day
and all through the night: That poem. I bit the poem’s ear.
again and again, until it bled anaphora. Stalking
me onomatopoetically down the sidewalk to where I kept my secret
sonnet turns inside. I just wanted to take a nap in Brooklyn,
sleep inside my source material, that pale of settlement,
the origin and end of everything in my family. So that the end
of my suffering might bring an insight, but the poem
turned my nap in Brooklyn into a series of disturbing
and surreal faces that made me awaken into the possibility that
I was the one who was so wrong, so ruined, damaged,
unable to sing. Yet, sometimes, honestly, I loved
what the poem said, when it convinced me of my tyranny.
I wanted to let go. I wanted its untouchable love.
The socio-poem’s persona  looked like Sir Mick Jagger, wore leather
pants, had biceps, smelled literary and up all night,
like bay rum and old books. The poem had a spell over me,
its incantory propulsion got into my blood and bile
with its rhythms that made my heart race. It mailed me
threatening letters, collages, containing articles about what happens
to women my age, how they die, again and again
alone and withering, like a nasty old tree
from a Saint Vincent Millay sonnet taught
in girl’s boarding schools. I wrestled the poem
until it swore to bless me, but it blessed me
in a language that made me feel uncomfortable.
It wasn’t a vowelic yawp. It was a brutal stuttering ich
that made me feel sick, unclean, subway ridden,
which gave the poem a great joy that made its message
clearer: I was a bitch. Crazy. And ruined everything.

Elizabeth A.I. Powell’s ‘The Republic of Self’ was a New Issue First Book Prize winner, selected by C.K. Williams. Her second book, “Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter” won the 2015 Anhinga Robert Dana Prize, selected by Maureen Seaton. Her work has appeared in the Pushcart Prize Anthology 2013, Harvard Review, Mississippi Review, Ploughshares, Zocalo Public Square, and elsewhere. She is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Northern Vermont University.