Gemma Cooper-Novack
IT ISN’T STILLNESS
It is disruption and distortion
Beneath your lips and buttery leather
fingertips doors spring apart—you are every-
where and nowhere and now
here, and these nights, these nights
these nights when you can’t be found
are long like legs. You watch
blankly from mahogany mantles, shifting
scales. You angle and rustle, everywhere and
nowhere like sirens, en route to somewhere
where you should be
else. Your tone never changes; your arms are always
smooth. You block each twist
smoothly, everywhere and nowhere and now
there, now there. When the shifting
shifting hips and tequila-tongued whispers
planes of your face pause like sculpture, it
isn’t stillness: on every elevator you
crackle with fissures, everywhere and nowhere like breathing,
your fingerprints found only in
in and out like tides
one spot, your heartbeat ragged.
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Gemma Cooper-Novack is a writer, writing coach, and arts educator based in Boston. Her poetry has appeared in Amethyst Arsenic (2013), ParkPages (2013), Blast Furnace Review (2013), Hanging Loose (1998, 2000, 2011, 2012), Lyre Lyre (2013), PressBoard Press (2013), Rufous City Review (2012), The Saint Ann’s Review (2003, 2005, 2009), and Spry (2013), and is forthcoming in Ballard Street Poetry Journal, Construction, and Referential. Her fiction is forthcoming in Elsewhere and Printer’s Devil Review. Her plays have been produced in Chicago and New York.