ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Gemma Cooper-Novack’s debut poetry collection We Might As Well Be Underwater, a finalist for the Central New York Book Award, was published by Unsolicited Press in 2017. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in more than twenty journals and been nominated for multiple Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net Awards. Her plays have been produced in Chicago, Boston, and New York. Gemma was a runner-up for the 2016 James Jones First Novel Fellowship; she has been awarded artist’s residencies from Catalonia to Virginia and a grant from the Barbara Deming Fund. She is a doctoral student in Literacy Education at Syracuse University.
Previously in Glass: A Journal of Poetry:
Endings
Oceanpurian
What if we forget about understanding
you said over
our footsteps
brushing grass and cement,
and a wave swept me like I might
have forgotten already and sat
inside sunlight on your bold blue
car when we’d barely met and you explained
the way you molded words in
your language couldn’t reshape
to fit the one we were speaking
— the weeks after he won every
spot my footsteps hit was something
else four years could destroy until
I rooted myself in a sand dune and the icy
ocean was ocean was ocean was no
force could stop it and I wished
for drowning,
not mine,
swallowing gold and white
houses whole, dome
and column and spire,
instead its rhythm caught
behind my sternum and I
was born of it before
my sister’s plane came in
— forget understanding you said
and just go on from there,
you know you can’t
really know what it’s like,
every word he spits out overturns me, language
lodging underneath my larynx,
and at the market two years after
his installation you gazed
at new strawberries and said you
were berrypur, a game you played in
your language with a suffix that
meant born of you explained you know, or child of
you weren’t sure if other
people used it for things
they loved, maybe it was
just you — berrypurian
for two or many,
I spent the weekend eating berries wondering what
to do when familiar horror forces itself
into your cheek in an unfamiliar language
forget understanding
it’s not the same as not caring, not the same
as saying it doesn’t matter
— sometimes in the months after he won and I
was driving a landlocked city the wave
that hit would make
my torso desperate, make me strain
to outdrive it at ninety miles
an hour, into the side of the wall,
I haven’t,
summer I drove
with you hours to the ocean knowing
I’ll never know how it feels to propel
myself from shore to pulsing green
Atlantic center four
buoyant miles beneath my pulsing lungs,
we chased water and let
it carry us, sometimes wove
languages through rivulets and sometimes
forgot them and tide
behind us took silence
further than it might have before
the outlast days scraped
so tightly on my throat
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
