the marriages: the remains
gemma cooper-novack
I married your fingers twice three
times four times until I could
have been shaped
entirely by your palms I bound myself to
tailored trousers hanging from
your hairpin hips I held
the footprints along trails where you’d had
to hide every piece of property
under roof and snow I married
you and married you and married you
kitten heartbeat jaguar
how could it possibly
ever have stopped
when you were gone
and gone and gone and gone
I married you and married you and married you and then I looked
for you scouring street corners the bomb
shelter door the train station the faded
scrubland camps ravaged with barbed wire
I embraced you eternally already
jaguar coffee on my tongue
and I looked for you even though
you were everywhere you were only
real in the dark
under bombs immaterial
under streetlight-streaked stillness and still
I married you even
when I lined my throat
with pills like bathroom tile
even when I married him
you were iridescent in wallpaper
the crook of my thigh
sweet jaguar mine
I was yours forever on snowdamp train tracks
to the black forest between camps and with knees
on black ash turned earth I tried
to explain it all to bones
tangled with other bones
under roots and snow and snow
so many other bones what
made me think yours
could even hear me
Gemma Cooper-Novack’s debut poetry collection We Might As Well Be Underwater, a finalist for the Central New York Book Award, was published by Unsolicited Press in 2017. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in more than twenty journals, including Glass, Midway Journal, and Lambda’s Poetry Spotlight, and been nominated for multiple Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net Awards. Her plays have been produced in Chicago, Boston, and New York. Gemma was a runner-up for the 2016 James Jones First Novel Fellowship; she has been awarded artist’s residencies from Catalonia to Virginia and a grant from the Barbara Deming Fund. She is a doctoral candidate in Literacy Education at Syracuse University.
