Gemma Cooper-Novack | She finds another country | Poets Resist

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, including Glass, Midway Journal, and Lambda’s Poetry Spotlight, 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 candidate in Literacy Education at Syracuse University.

Gemma Cooper-Novack’s Website.

Also by Gemma Cooper-Novack: We Might As Well Be Underwater Straight Girls Cicadas

Previously in Glass: A Journal of Poetry: Endings Oceanpurian

Poets Resist
Edited by Kanika Lawton
July 2, 2019

Gemma Cooper-Novack

She finds another country

and the skin below her floating rib accordions like the road behind her wasn't abyss after abyss. Like women throatily scarfknotted to other women could be her, trailing no destruction, uncomplicit in cages, gaseous borders, drones that hulk like marabou storks, waiting, just waiting. Streets of another country pulse with genders, wigs, wheels, toothpaste. Drinks glow behind glass. Another country means untwisting, means wheels won't exceed her hard enough to kill if she lost against them. How will her friends, man, woman, stand above waterfalls, pledging eternity? How can they promise? Countries expand, contract like iron lungs. What is it not to be inside?