Tuesday poem #211 : Jessica Popeski : Seven by Three

Pigeons upholster a wire. The sky diffuses, apricot to

coffee-ground black. I pick off my nail polish like it's

my job, don't— quietly— don’t, don’t eat exactly sixteen

grapes (every night.) Amalgamate skittering thoughts;

midges in a net. Me step-grandad sold cigarettes from

a dispenser on’t kitchen wall, smoked most ov ‘em

‘is’sen, lungs congested wi’ cancer, treacle-like tar.

I backspace a comma, consider a semicolon. Below,

a streetcar bells. Its Tristan chord stacks an augmented

fourth, sixth, and ninth above the bass, elicits a wince,

like chewing lime when expecting tangerine, segments

riddled with pips, maggot-white. My maine coon

rearranges his coat on the arm of the settee, spine turned.

Cats don't worry about being seen as antisocial, walk

away when they've had enough human, will stalk a wiggle

of string, suspend disbelief, imagine a vole. My shoulders

are up to my earlobes, the stiffness of over-pumped tyers.

You visit, undisclosed. There’s a better way to cook.

You are glassy. You are lavender in my pillowcase. Later,

water stutters, kneads me. My voice will never be more

radiant than in the bathroom with the shower on full.

Jessica Popeski is a Classical Voice and Creative Writing graduate from Brandon University, where she was awarded the Silver Medal in Creative Arts for her thesis, Big Sky. Sickle Moon. Her poetry has been published internationally in Acta Victoriana, The Cadaverine, carte blanche, The Irish Literary Review, Canvas Magazine, Boston Poetry, Room, Leaf Press, The Nervous Breakdown, Hart House Review, The Windsor Review, Harbinger Assylum, and more. A recipient of the Ontario Graduate Scholarship, she is in the thick of an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Guelph, and an English tutor at Humber College. She published two chapbooks with Anstruther Press in 2015: Oratorio and The Wrong Place, which made the syllabus of an undergraduate Creative Writing program. She was raised, for the most part, in Moscow, Russia, and Sheffield, England, by her mother and grandmother, and writes poetry in Toronto.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan