fall in love again & again

By Jessica Popeski

after charlie xcx

​the thirty-first day of spring
& it feels like minus five. only
the pussy willow has something
to say for itself: swarms of
silver catkins. my pit bull front
 
crawls in dream, natters, fangs
twinkling. i fall in love again &
again. if you can get groceries,
you can teach on campus,
says an hr representative in
 
my inbox, but i rely on delivery.
they don’t believe my foot is
in fragments. i sneeze & bust
my leg; clap & split my kneecap
in two; a cantaloupe, halved. 

---

what remains

By Jessica Popeski

after ocean vuong & jeannette winterson

iii
 
you throw a party at our house.
water the money trees. string
goldenrod lights. order wings &
ubiquitous liquor. i'm not invited.
your friends are wolves. it's
 
christmas eve. i down trazodone.
zopiclone. shove in earplugs.
round up our dogs like a collie
with lambs. i wake with the bass
in my bones, rottweiler belting.
 
cocaine peppers our counters.
grown men hurl punches on our
lawn. our neighbours rattle our
walls. in the morning, i sing carols
at your church. silent night. we
 
three kings. in the bleak midwinter.
sun blushes through stained glass.
snow putters. mary bathed in lapis
lazuri. you don't show. women in
my inbox tell me where you've been.


 
viii
 
the dread of evening. still,
signs of new life: vulpine
 
pansies, crocuses, egg shell &
plum. the house, a hard knot
 
against the bloodshot sky. he
holds my bones & asks what
 
will his friends think. at least
the earth will be lighter. my
 
mum always said i'd come to
a sticky end. my wrists are
 
braceletted in blood, the
slap of cold & getting lost in
 
too many happy birthdays.
the bathroom is river-slick,
 
bubbles accumulating like
cancer. i count appliances:
 
off, off, off. the metal of his
tongue. the weapon of his jaw.
 
he unloads onto me all of his
terror; i am sick to the gut with
 
it. why is my mind incapable
of deciding its own subject
 
matter? my rottweiler chugging
clorox; my pit bull dashing from
 
the cliff at lion's head, suds
from the tide, pearls below.

---

imagine

By Jessica Popeski

​imagine a poem without
a cliff face, weeds the only
sign of life. no balcony to
fling myself from, kersplat
 
into porcelain snow, wind so
violent i could fall in love. a
poem without train tracks
stuccoed with dizzyingly yellow
 
dandelions. a poem with two
feet, intact, no cane, no crutch.
a colon without a slip knot. no
scar-zippered belly. a poem
 
without rupture, without
a fallopian tube snipped off.
a functioning reproductive
system. a poem without
 
blood. with flesh on its bones.
a poem without numbers
annotating its pages, calories
counted. a poem without guilt,
 
or badness. a freshly showered
poem. a poem that doesn’t
sing three happy birthdays
while it washes its hands.

---

​Jessica Popeski is a queer, dis/abled opera singer, professor, and intersectional ecofeminist poet. Named one of Tkaronto’s “exceptional up and coming writers” by Open Book, she authored Oratorio and The Wrong Place with Anstruther Press, and the problem with having a body and grenoside with Gordon Hill Press. She was raised in Moscow and Sheffield by her mother and grandmother, and lives with her pit bull-poodle on land which is covered by Treaty 13 and the Williams Treaties, the traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat peoples.