by Gemma Cooper-Novack

                                            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.

The post Gemma Cooper-Novack appeared first on Tampa Review.

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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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.

The post Gemma Cooper-Novack appeared first on Tampa Review.

by Gemma Cooper-Novack

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

============================================================================
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.

The post Gemma Cooper-Novack appeared first on Tampa Review.