I DON’T BELONG HERE
Outside the plexiglass thousands of sodden acres stretch and not a single human structure jars my sight. Ducks glide over the water that floods the plains and ripples from the wind chase one another like the way you speak: the lines stroking and wavering and vivid in sunlight, the languages catching each other’s whisking tails. In these rough clear miles of America where you don’t belong, your voice would shake the brown trees and standing water and sheets of earth from their complacence: your lips catching my throat, my blunt fingers catching the tremors in your breath beneath unmoving clouds.
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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.