D.A. Powell appeared in Issue 6 with a poem that moves through boyhood memory, danger, secrecy, pirate imagery, Peter Pan, and the unstable border between play and vulnerability.
D.A. Powell in the historical archive
Issue 6’s contributor note identifies Powell as the author of Tea and Lunch, both published by Wesleyan, and records recent appearances in Chelsea, Interim, Solo, and Prairie Schooner. It also notes his forthcoming Briggs-Copeland Lectureship in Poetry at Harvard University.
Boyhood and pirate myth
The poem folds childhood experience into the language of adventure stories. Galleons, lost boys, forts, darkness, and the “nevernever” create a mythic surface through which memory keeps returning. The imaginative vocabulary gives the poem distance while preserving the seriousness of what is remembered.
Syntax, memory, and fracture
Powell’s punctuation breaks the poem into abrupt units, with colons and wide spaces repeatedly interrupting narrative flow. Memory arrives in flashes and fragments, and the page reflects that instability through its pacing.
Play, danger, and vulnerability
Games and childhood rituals carry an undercurrent of threat. Hide-and-seek, forts, creekside gatherings, clothing, and domestic questions accumulate into a world where play and exposure remain closely entangled.
Belief and return
The closing repetition of belief recalls the ritual language of Peter Pan. Powell turns that familiar phrase into a return point after a difficult sequence of memories, leaving belief suspended between childhood magic and the adult act of remembering.
Further reading
Continue through the archive’s guide to sound in poetry, its page on imagery in poetry, and its overview of modern poetry.