Gemma Cooper-Novack
Marriage: The golem
I came back to you / gun like one
of your fingers clinging to pink
doorframe / I screamed when you slithered
around me / loose skin on my arms
flaccid between teeth / like I’d screamed every
month you’d knocked me out of what
tried to kill me / like I’d screamed
every time you opened me wider
than I knew I went / I’d been so long
crumpled / so long squeezed shut /
I came back to where you crouched
in hollows of pink walls / I knew them /
they were clean / they breathed / you
hurled yourself so hard past my memories you nearly
turned me inside out / that was what
I wanted / my own pink pulsing tendons obscuring
numbers in ink / I wanted your eyes in darkness /
pale moonlike bulges / I still didn’t know if
I would have seen them through ash clouds but it
didn’t matter / it didn’t matter where you
came from but where were you whenever
you ripped yourself from me / I never knew until
you came back / until you came back / Oh my golem
I came back to you and found you with joints
and limbs on apricot bedspread / I tucked
myself to your thin amphibian skin / it breathed
on mine / your fingers so long / waters and lands
I’d crossed so long / I came back to you and you scratched
me under my chin and I never
wanted anything more
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Gemma Cooper-Novack is the author of We Might As Well Be Underwater (Unsolicited Press, 2017). She is a queer, disabled, Jewish antizionist writer whose poetry and fiction have appeared in more than forty journals, including Glass, Midway Journal, and Lambda’s Poetry Spotlight, and whose been nominated for multiple Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net Awards. Published chapbooks include Too Much Like a Landscape (Warren Tales, 2015) and Bedside Manner (The Head and the Hand, 2020). Gemma’s plays have been produced in Syracuse, Chicago, Boston, and New York. She was a runner-up for the 2016 James Jones First Novel Fellowship, and has been awarded artist’s residencies from Catalonia to Virginia and a grant from the Barbara Deming Fund. Gemma was a winner of Syracuse University’s 2023 All University Doctoral Prize for her hybrid poetic dissertation exploring the writing lives of LGBTQ+ teenagers.
Author’s Backstory: This poem is part of a series in which I explore tales and constructs of marriage between human and non-human(s) from mythology, history, and idiom. We live in a society that claims the sanctity of monogamous marriage between two humans, often two humans of genders considered opposite, but we live in a culture steeped with tales of marriages that take completely different forms. As an unmarried, queer poet, I’m constantly discovering new ideas from these tales. “The golem” comes from Jewish mythology, but takes much of its imagery from William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice.
Editor’s Notes and/or Image Credit: A line from the poem, “my own pink pulsing tendons obscuring numbers in ink,” was input to the Microsoft Designer, which led to an absurd imaginative image that still works.
