LUXURY
She can lie bare in dry cedar heat until her skin stretches into lizard geometry and it's crisp on her lips delicious She can gaze through the haze on the roiling hills until the water bubbling up beneath her arms lies still and the light leaves her be She can see herself pore by pore streak by streak and strand by strand the missed stroke on her fingernail She can feel the weight peel from her hips roll by roll so good She can wait in this state for hours lemon slices against her eyelids and the light behind them fracturing golden until evening floods her day until she sweeps into sleep and a cavern of inhalation through her nose exhalation through her lips rests around her
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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.