Gemma Cooper-Novack is a writer, arts educator, and writing coach. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in more than twenty journals, including Amethyst Arsenic, Ballard Street Poetry Journal (Pushcart Prize nomination), Bellevue Literary Review, Cider Press Review, and Santa Fe Writers Project. Gemma’s plays have been produced in Chicago and New York, and her articles have appeared on Feminist Review and Elevate Difference and in NASPA Knowledge Communities. She has been awarded artist’s residencies at Can Serrat Centro de Actividades Artísticas in Catalonia, the Betsy Hotel Writer’s Room in Miami Beach, BetterArts in northern New York, and Wildacres in North Carolina, and enjoys baking cookies and walking on stilts in her spare time.
I never spoke to her again.It was all telegraphy. The manat the Marconi station knew me betterthan I knew myself. The seagullsdidn’t know anythingexcept that I was distractedat bright hours by dashand dot, liable to leave my sandwich.My memory replaced hervoice with click and rattle. As for mine,it had been years since that mattered. She never touched me again,obviously. My… Read more →
Finally I saw your wrists only turned three ways, your knees went only up and down, I was tangled with you, always tangled. It took me so long to know where you ended, I’d been so thrilled you moved at all. But there was only one way when you were up against me, and after it was so hard to… Read more →
Been up since Tuesday salving your grease into the claw mark on my shoulder. Slick and soothing on the tender skin, the ragged edges. Spent most of winter so far in the next room over, my pajamas delicious against your sweet fur, and the snow outside foot-deep hunks of glass could never trickle in the edges, never see our eyes…. Read more →
Sometimes when you’re sleeping so deeply the walls breathe with you I slip on your skin rich oil at my hips and shoulders and it does nothing to my flesh not even when I’m staring straight from the window to the ocean not even when I’m watching the slick heads bob in and out of whitecaps looking for you—not even… Read more →