Jessica Coles (she/her) is a poet and editor from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada (Treaty 6 territory), where she lives with her family and a judgmental tuxedo cat named Miss Bennet. Many years ago, she got a B.A. in linguistics that she currently uses to write love poems. Her work has appeared in Prairie Fire, Moist Poetry Journal, and You are a Flower Growing off the Side of a Cliff: a chapbook about mental health and resiliency (League of Canadian Poets chapbook series). Her first chapbook, unless you’re willing to evaporate, is available through Prairie Vixen Press. She often tweets micropoems and creative encouragement as @milkcratejess.
Here is unshaped breath. Can I rename this sleeping air? This sound is an ocean, older than voice. It still hisses from unsophisticated throats. You mistake my interest in phonetics.…
Curtain flicker: your eyes, no—my eyes, nighttime windows: women walking half-naked back-lit big screen TV, what am I watching? No one made a Netflix special of your smile, I blink…
The flyers that are delivered despite the "No Junk Mail" sticker on my mailbox are an omen. If there's a truth that everyone should know, it's sold at Canadian Tire,…
You must be a ghost because some days ghosts are the only thing worth loving. I mean—young ghost, I don't love you. I mean—I don't know how to splinter love…
Is it absurd to wonder whether galaxies mourn the death of their stars? I assign breath to entities with no lungs; I expect the by-product of body chemicals to exist…
Respect that the words don't know how to flow today, love. They congeal and coagulate. You can't be part of them. Viscosity is a bitch and so is insolubility. Put…
How am I supposed to forget about the frogs? They were lined up along the upright freezers. It started, I suppose, because frogs can't make plans. It's the small brain.…
Where could we drive with sleep permeating the back seat? Driving was the point and not the point. Here is where the eagles circled above the waste management centre. Did…
Among the things I no longer see in my house is the ghost of a ladybug that haunts my uncertain geranium. The geranium's uncertainty is, in part, due to the…
An unshareable autumn night: you + I walked along sodium-lit sidewalks. Stars tucked themselves in squirrels nests but didn't know how to hide. You laughed, pressed a wafer cookie onto…