Jessica Lee McMillan
I'll Come Back as a Strathearn Paperweight
I’ll just come back as a paperweight of dense phantom glass, a universe convex hugging the walls in the lens of time, the objet d’art...
Jessica Lee McMillan
Jessica Lee McMillan is a poet, educator 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 and she is working on her second chapbook.
Jessica's work explores perception, existential concerns, language, the body, pop culture, music, film, social justice, nature, physics 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, QayQayt and Kwikwetlem First Nations.
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Jessica Lee McMillan
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...
Jessica Lee McMillan
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...
Jessica Lee McMillan
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...
Jessica Lee McMillan
Reflections on Glass
Free verse How the cerebellum spills over the shiny panes reflecting the sky, the world in freehand sketching transparent refractions of...
Jessica Lee McMillan
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...
Jessica Lee McMillan
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...
Jessica Lee McMillan
Sky Panes
The bridge tower vaults and church spire hangs under the day moon conversing on altitude with steel-boned views bridge cables and cross...
Jessica Lee McMillan
Lemonade Day
When I passed the lemonade stand, I passed my childhood, late August on the sidewalk, next to the church with humble interior walls,...
Jessica Lee McMillan
Forensics
Hands in motion smudge surfaces unforgiving of polish We groove and light life’s glass of shifting images with our living fingerprints...
Jessica Lee McMillan
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...
Jessica Lee McMillan
ROYGBIV
Memory is a basement carpeted in orange and brown, electronics warm, vinyl cords in rainbow of 7 colours 7 notes in analog polyphony...
Jessica Lee McMillan
Anatomy of a Funeral
Standard-issue funeral option tombstones are concrete slabs like ashes in a cardboard box, aggregate mixtures of concrete sprawl, a...
Jessica Lee McMillan
Magpie
You can tell I’m a magpie by the pieces I carry: the magpie, a collector, a good-luck bird, full of words, hiding in patterns round...
Jessica Lee McMillan
A Gathering of Leaves
Poetry by Jessica Lee McMillan On a shelf of volumes bound to me, binding, I extend the vertebrae, the body, a gathering of sewn leaves,...
Jessica Lee McMillan
Anatomy of Summer Wind
Poetry by Jessica Lee McMillan The wind reads my turning pages white dress waving cotton and blanket flaps over dirt swallows whirr for a...