Poetry By Jess Gagne

Shawn Nystrand CC




tritina for my friend who keeps buying fentanyl 
for Katie and Nick

When someone you love has briefly died 
               four times in the past six months, they say: detach 
with love. Sometimes it’s hard to make the call, 
                                    but you’ll know it’s time to detach with 
love when love just isn’t cutting it, when you’re 
                                    not saving anyone’s life with your love, 

when your love isn’t changing anything or helping 
                                                  or fixing everything, when love
starts to feel worthless – “Careful, before love loses 
                                   all meaning forever,” you’re told, “detach
with love.” When it feels easier to break 
                                                          up with love itself than with

that person who just keeps trying to die, 
                        and they can’t help it, break up, instead, with
the idea of being able to rescue someone 
                                                       from anything other than love.
They say it’s the hardest thing, 
                                 to care about someone enough to detach. 

Forgive me if I seem detached, if we don’t talk – 
I don’t want to say anything other than “I love you.”





​fantasy with the cure for cancer (ghost ghazal)

Instead of dying, my mother runs marathons, chasing the orange splash 
of her spark bird through the trumpet vine in search of one more autumn not a ghost.

In her poem, she swims the white apple blossoms of the orchard until she climbs 
out of the flowering pool in search of the man she knows is on the moon: a maybe-ghost.

In my grandparents’ living room, I try on her wedding dress and take Polaroids, 
and she is there to shake the frame until I appear, white, her finger in the corner a ghost. 

In the mirror not covered with black cloth, I grow into the yellowing lace. She says, 
“There’s no harm in believing that I’ll live to see my grandchildren,” and I dream her ghost.

In the dream, everyone else dies instead. Wet with guilt, I mourn; will not wake until she 
finds me, and I tell her, trembling with forbidden relief: everyone we know is now a ghost. 

In both worlds, my mother refills the birdfeeder. She wreathes olive branches, eucalyptus,
yellow jessamine, and the mist on the morning glory into a gift from her ghost.




​Jess Gagne (she/her) is a Montessori educator and poet from Connecticut who is currently living, teaching, and writing in Brooklyn. She is an Events Associate at Brooklyn Poets and a member of the Sweet Action Poetry Collective who is working on keeping all her plants alive, mastering the art of the stationary bicycle, reading more non-fiction, and observing a new small detail about the world each day. You can follow her on Instagram @infinitejess__