She walks behind the theater

halfway through morning; 

no one's up. Her heels

scratch pavement from

Alysa's temporary door to

her uncle's house. At Alysa's wedding,

while Alysa and new husband

Michael danced, she

put her leg

over the thigh

of a playwright who only turned

to her when the blonde

with straight-line nose

and brows dismissed him. The by-the-hour

motel heaved secondhand

smoke, had mirrored ceilings.

At the wedding, vows brought up

children a dozen times;

last night Alysa

explained Michael’s liquid nights, dry crackling

weekends, said it might

be over, all of it over.

Alysa's older than she is, but her jaw

looked young for over,

penciled frames of

her eyes whined with the unknown.

She didn't know

which of the things she said

to say. When they

were children in apartment

above apartment, every neighbor

girl wished she was Alysa—actress,

ballerina, adolescent fights

screaming up nights through water pipes.

Last night Alysa wept

to her as if she were

another adult, as if someday she

could touch a marriage like

Alysa with her open dancer palms

and have it hurt. 

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.