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Jessica Lee McMillan

Jessica Lee McMillan is a poet and civil servant with an MA in English and currently enrolled in Simon Fraser University's The Writer's Studio. When not writing, she spends time with her little family, her big dog and buries herself in books and records. Her first chapbook is forthcoming in Fall 2023 via Rose Garden Press.

Jessica's work explores perception, existential concerns, language, the body, pop culture, music, film, social justice, natural science and scale.

She can be read presently/forthcoming in Humber Literary Review, Blank Spaces Magazine, Pinhole Poetry, Riddled with Arrows, Antilang, Tiny Spoon, Dream Pop Journal, Gap Riot Press, SORTES, Train Poetry Journal, Lover's Eye Press, Red Alder Review and others. 

Jessica is a first-generation Canadian settler who lives in New Westminster, British Columbia on stolen and unsurrendered lands of the Coast Salish and Halkomelem-speaking Peoples, in particular, the Kwantlen, Katzie, Kwikwetlem and QayQayt First Nations.

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Interloper

The first to be accused of robbing the good Captain were local Indigenous men and the bullet hole is still wedged in the doorframe by the...

New Ceilings

We watch the trees for the give and take. Our eyes cup the weight of leaves, the deaths that make new ceilings When the heart breaks, it...

Word Garden

Foraging metaphors, my winter garden is spare, pared-down, pruned within an inch of life like ghost-blossom hydrangeas chopped to woody...

Proven Objects

At the flea market the blocks of clay we bought instead of the latest toys carved our imaginations to a polish in our hands In second...

Saltwater Taffy

The famous batch of taffy flooded by an ocean swell in Atlantic City created the paradoxically salty confection. This is the origin...

Green Age

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees Is my destroyer And I am dumb...

First Light

After Freddie Hubbard first light skims on green wing like sprouts strobing for ray climbs from soils of night, through damask-leafed...

The Meteorite

Our room grew a hole when the sky landed by our heads and, when meteorite met bed of linen taut with our stereotypical tensions, the...

Baby Teeth

Autumn is the season of falling leaves childhood is a season of losing teeth The loss of the first incisors starts at the dissolving of...

Whiplash

The pavement was dry, February grey —enough traction for the drunk to correct his advance left In physio, I took care of the whiplash but...

Reflections on Glass

Free verse How the cerebellum spills over the shiny panes reflecting the sky, the world in freehand sketching transparent refractions of...

The Dark Crystal and the Uncanny

What Henson's psychological universe teaches us Master world-maker Jim Henson defined my childhood with alphabet letters taught by...

Crow and Bridge

Locking eyes with a perched crow is a transference of bird’s-eye-view, the binocular reconciling of separate frames in one image, side...

The Body Is a Blackout Poem

Bandaids are my tales of chaos on playgrounds, the dermal terrain of nicks and scratches donned in battle with objects I collide, a...

Accidental Sunflower

Somehow a patch of sunflowers bloomed from the street corner — a concrete wedge of dog waste baggies, trash from the cannabis shop and...

ROYGBIV

Memory is a basement carpeted in orange and brown, electronics warm, vinyl cords in rainbow of 7 colours 7 notes in analog polyphony...

Anatomy of a Funeral

Standard-issue funeral option tombstones are concrete slabs like ashes in a cardboard box, aggregate mixtures of concrete sprawl, a...

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