“dreamsongs for two working feet” by jessica popeski
Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “dreamsongs for two working feet” by jessica popeski.
dreamsongs for two working feet
By jessica popeski
a truck grinds her foot into flour.
mangled. fresh. incandescent blood.
plum skin stretched over cranberry
flesh. it seesaws categorizations
of limb & meat. between alive &
necrotic. who knows if she’ll keep
it. there’s a pandemic. everybody
calls. her nurse teaches her how
to pray: hand high-fiving heart,
eyes to sky, to a mutiny of swallows.
she daydreams fire, smoke fogging
oyster-pink lungs, of weightlessness
in the belly, like being pushed on a
swing, counts on her fingers how many
seconds until she snaps onto church
street, of downing all her oxycodone.
it’s been so long since she cubed
shallots, destemmed broccoli, had
her arms up to her elbows in dish
water muck. she can’t stand it. each
day, a different woman scrubs her
shoulders, slathers sandalwood &
vanilla, towel-dries her hair: immaculate.
she can’t grumble. the tonnage of
isolation buckles her spine. she wants
her life to be a circus of dogs, of overripe
peaches, of redolent, mowed lawns.
Copyright © jessica popeski
Forthcoming in grenoside (Gordon Hill Press, 2026).
Jessica Popeski is a dis/abled opera singer, professor, and internationally published, intersectional ecofeminist poet. Named one of Tkaronto’s “exceptional up and coming writers” by Open Book, she authored “Oratorio” and “The Wrong Place” with Anstruther Press. “the problem with having a body” was published with Gordon Hill Press, and “grenoside” is forthcoming in Fall 2026. She was raised in Moscow, Russia, and Sheffield, England, by her mother and grandmother.
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