Nicole Cooley
Winter 2023 | Poetry
Three Poems
Trash
My mother lines the kitchen can with a pink scented bag. In New Orleans, it’s not yet 2005, not that fall when mattresses, refrigerators, pulled from houses, slump on ruined lawns, turn to trash no one picks up. In New Orleans, it’s 1977, and on TV Jimmy Carter talks about natural gas—which I imagine not as vapor but as scraps and mud— All of us must learn to waste less energy— talks about thermostats, lowering heat, yet I’m thinking about Sesame Street which I’m too old to watch, about Oscar the Grouch singing I love Trash, claiming the trash can where he lives contains farm, swimming pool, ice rink, bowling alley, piano. My mother tosses TAB cans in the storm drain, grinds cigarette after cigarette in the grass. Natural Gas, I hold the phrase in my mouth, though all I want is a fistful of gravel to fling at my own face. All I want is to be careless which I am not. Oscar is singing: Anything dirty or dingy or dusty, Anything ragged or rotten or rusty. And it’s not yet 2010 when oil will spill (another word to hold uselessly in the mouth) then burn through the Gulf –slick of dark on the water’s surface, pelican’s wings stuck shut.
Waste Always Overflows Its Official Meanings
While I Dead Man’s float in the Gulf, a hundred years in the future
another mother smokes at the waterline in a chair woven of ocean plastic.
On my desk, at home, I will gather a basket of sea glass, glitter and pink,
all trash like fast fashion, my daughter’s bag of discarded dresses from Forever 21.
To Consume, late 14th century, to destroy by separating
into parts which cannot be reunited, as by burning or eating.
Mary Douglas might call it matter out of place.
Tonight again I’ll dream Styrofoam fills my throat
and wake up choking to see a spill of hair on my pillow, comforted to know
it belongs to the other mother. A pinched scent of bleach
drifts across the water. On the sand, too hot rain hits my shoulders,
edge of a serrated knife.
The World’s First Incinerator Was Called a Crematory
At my desk I write down this fact as smoke
plumes down over our town from Canada. We mask
again. I watch the churn of my ceiling fan
and recall daughter in her stroller enchanted by the fan
at the Queens pastry shop, and now
she and I choke on muddled air when we step onto the porch.
Don’t say, here my child is another disaster
in this world we made and unmade for you.
Windows sealed shut, back at my desk I read,
In 1879 there was no plastic, no polyethylene
or polystyrene—and recall the day I threw out my daughters’
sippy cups and tiny bowls, as if ridding the house of plastic
would be enough. Now what is burning?
What will you take with you when you evacuate New Orleans?
I asked my mother over and over as she assured me
of the accordion file she kept in my childhood bedroom.
This year I learn that fires like hurricanes are named—
Burn it all, I used to say to be dramatic, before I was a mother.
Meanwhile I simmer uselessly with anxiety, as the train tunnels
under the river, away from my daughters. Meanwhile
when the smoke from Canada finally clears, still, five miles
from my house the Newark incinerator ignites and burns all night.
Nicole Cooley is the author of six books of poems, most recently Of Marriage (Alice James Books 2018) and Girl after Girl after Girl (LSU Press 2017), as well as the forthcoming Mother Water Ash (LSU Press 2024). Her poems have appeared most recently in Poetry, DIODE, and Scoundrel Time. She is a professor in the English Department and the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation at Queens College, City University of New York.