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.
This poem has its own house, a hundred closets where the mismatched towels go, one cupboard where the dishes rattle and chip because a train loses its track about 50…
Lacking heat, I line my ribs with decorative votives, light them, and forget to say a prayer. A service of lips reading words that slide away like the difference between…
Tongue. Found balled up in an inside-out pant leg while pulling laundry out of the dryer. Slightly felted. No longer fits quite right. Manufacturer discontinued the original model and has…
Joni's looking at both sides of the clouds, and I wonder what could make me feel like I'm not walking on a marble. I'm hidden under the swirls of smoke…
Dear woman, love your belly. Wrap yourself in handwoven dresses; let starwhispers linger in your ears. Don't dismiss your wisdom just because it's incomplete. You learned how to tend your…
Our family arrives in the field after dark. Though it isn't really dark—a streetlight illuminates the alley, the sun hasn't quite released the horizon. My children are giddy with invisibility.…
Dearheart, you're not the person I walked with. It isn't you in this blurred polaroid. Remember: I learned your lips one evening, only that one. How did you become yarn…
Sometimes I don't know where I am. I don't know how to describe what I'm doing, the company I'm in. My surroundings don't want to be encased in language. Roots…
My first month off work didn’t have as much writing as I'd hoped. My time seemed to get nibbled by mother things: dealing with school, appointments, the 24-hour care of…