Gemma Cooper-Novack

I DON’T BELONG HERE

by Gemma Cooper-Novack

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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Cooper-Novack author picGemma 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.

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