Celia Lisset Alvarez has been living in Miami, Florida, almost all her life, since her parents emigrated from Cuba after the Castro revolution. She has two collections of poetry, The Stones (Finishing Line Press, 2006) and Shapeshifting (Spire Press, 2006), winner of the 2005 Spire Press Poetry Award. “What It Takes to Be Lois Lane” appears in the recently released anthology Letters to the World (Red Hen Press, 2008), a collection of poems from the University of Southern Maine’s Women’s Poetry List, affectionately known as “Wom-po” to its hundreds of members from throughout the world.
At twenty-one she graduated magna cum laude
with a degree in English. Her first apartment
had a leaky faucet that kept her up nights
and a view of the bridge to Metropolis.
Her shoes pinched as she walked
handing over typed carbon copies of her resume
explaining once again that she was not interested
in the secretary position, although she was
good at steno and really appreciated
that comment about her legs.
Late nights with the stray cat
who got in through the fire escape
(she called him Elroy), she looked
out the window and dreamed of uncovering
corruption in the city government.
Her first week at the Daily Planet
they made her get coffee for the fellas,
and assigned her a story on the Junior League.
Writing back to Sam and Ella, she asked
about the weather in Pittsdale, said hello to Lucy,
and could you please send a little money,
although I’m doing just fine.
When those naked pictures Jimmy Olsen took
somehow wound up in Playboy, she went missing
for three days. Some say they saw her with Lex Luthor
in Detroit, sipping screwdrivers and go-go dancing
around the Metro area in white cowboy boots.
At work in her ruffled collar and solid pumps
she looked only at her typewriter. Promptly at five,
she walked into the phonebooth, closed the door,
and screamed for fifteen minutes. Nights with Elroy
and the faucet, she meditated on her chakras, placing
the green crystal Lex gave her on her flat,
grumbling navel.
***
Throughout the month of April, National Poetry Month, poets from the Caribbean and South Florida will be featured on this blog.
1 comment:
That is a wonderful poem. Perfect.
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