~ Delta Poetry Review ~

Nicole Cooley, Featured Poet

Nicole Cooley grew up in New Orleans, Louisiana, and has published seven collections of poems. Her most recent book is the collection of poetry Mother Water Ash (Louisiana University Press, July 2024), as well as the two poetry collections, Girl after Girl after Girl (Louisiana State University Press, 2017) and Of Marriage (Alice James Books, 2018). She has published four other collections of poems, Breach, Milk Dress, The Afflicted Girls, and Resurrection, as well as a novel, two chapbooks, and a collaborative artist’s book. Her next book is the forthcoming poetry collection, Trash, which will appear with Alice James Books in 2027.

     Her awards include the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, a Discovery/The Nation Award, an NEA, a Creative Artists fellowship from The American Antiquarian Society, the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America, and a New Jersey Arts Council Grant.

     Currently, she is a professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation and the English Department at Queens College—City University of New York, where she also directs the college-wide reading series Writers at Queens. She lives in New Jersey with her family.

Mother Water Ash

Mother gone to ash    river gone to drowned

I don’t live here anymore    as my friends remind

Now I walk the edge of the Grand Central Parkway

Flushing Meadows Park    world’s fair gone dark

what is ashed and drowned    what is abandoned

Mother gone    drowned in her body the night

she died alone in New Orleans    ashed her cigarette

then left us    did I go dark when the N train lost power

on my way home    while the burning threaded through

my baby’s hair    city doused in ash    impossible

to keep the outside out    River Road beside my parents’ house

leads to Cancer Alley    Mother gone but once with her

I drove through the drowned city    two months after

the storm    yellowed grass    houses gone    the road

a slur of empty    is it any wonder I’ve followed her advice

to subtract myself    good daughter always    till I’m not

did I go dark when she left me    when will my daughters

while my mother’s mouth is all slick black feathers

From Mother Water Ash (2024), Louisiana State University Press

[Once the coastline spoke: I plan to disappear and tell you nothing.]

Once the coastline spoke: I plan to disappear and tell you nothing.

Geographic body, etched on a map. Count the houses where families live,

where a river splinters, saltwater surges

through a channel built for ships and oil, dredged and leveed,

children die. To myself, I spoke:

you need to be less daughter, you need

to go home to your own daughters,

to be a mother, to stop walking the Mississippi’s edge. But the Gulf

is burning, marshes disappearing, sidewalk buckling

like a choking throat. The coastline advises:

Count my waves. Count the days your mother

has been gone. Count the hurricanes, the floods,

the times the water unspooled and didn’t drown the town.

From Mother Water Ash (2024), Louisiana State University Press

Sixteen Years to the Day Another Hurricane Reverses

the Mississippi’s course    my father waits in our house

beside the river    and I dream my mother    drowning

water closing over her head    in my dreams she is always

dying    in the too warm Gulf    then pricked alive again

fairy tale spindle    my friends and I text each other

to describe dreams    in which our mothers

ask us why they’re dead    New Orleans is the place

around which I uselessly orbit    after Katrina typing

my mother’s name   Missing Person Jacki Cooley

into search engines    sixteen years ago my daughters asked

what is a hurricane’s eye    what can it see

then my mother was alive    refusing to leave the city

now I text my father    how high is the water    are there tornadoes

phone and electric out    I wish for a slick of river

to spare our house    while in a new dream about my mother

she thrashes to the Gulf’s sand floor    where she can’t

burn or come apart

From Mother Water Ash (2024), Louisiana State University Press

Trash Definition

Trash and garbage: not the same. Nor is offal. Nor is sewage.

See my childhood home, between a highway and a river strewn with Styrofoam.

See separate the dry: paper, wood, bottles. Garbage is wet organic matter.

See 2020. Discarded masks, gloves on the sidewalk. We’re not to touch anything now.

See construction debris, ash, street sweepings.

Katrina’s aftermath, houses waterlined, furniture dragged to the sidewalk. Slop. Manure.

Or the word filth which I have always found beautiful.

We are the world’s most wasteful nation.

See the too hot Mississippi run with chemicals. Gowanus Canal scattered with cans.

Save and discard. Burn or bury.

Trash is our best export. After oil.

Microplastics. Nanoplastics. Nurdles lodged in our bodies.

See 2020. Daughters disinfecting groceries, pitching wipes in a bucket.

See miasma, also much too lovely.

Discard or save? Who will decide?

Trash not trash until we name it so.

 Trashscape Girlhood

Trashy, worthless first attested 1620—

At the river E and I smoke my mother’s cigarettes    rope swing   barge    our trusted landscape.

It’s the morning after we watch The Day After    movie we were told not to see alone.

We don’t discuss it.

Are two girls not safe alone at the edge of a river?

How to think about the word rot, I might consider much later.

Let’s go back and imagine bodies on fire, melting, the world gone nuclear.

Or the sky above the Mississippi, waxy, color of turned milk.

Or also the river, slick with green and fever bright.

Childhood for us was a flicker, a sting? Not a melting.

Gone nuclear—is this a chance to be very angry?

Seep and leak.

Are two girls not safe?

How the Cold War starts and continues.

Meanwhile what would it mean to be trashy: Too much makeup? Dirty hair? Splintered fingernails?

What would it mean to be radioactive?

Gone nuclear?

Yes once again, how a woman is turned trash by virtue of a short skirt.

At the edge.

How we tally    how in the movie we learn about body counts    radiation    bomb blooming

over and over in slow motion    we are reckless girls who know the world is ending

How we are girls ready for fall-out and no shelter

We are girls who don’t trust ourselves because we have been taught not to.

How my high school teacher made me read

the first paragraph of Lolita out loud to him alone in a dark room.

Leak.    Tally.    Count.

How many years till the end of the earth.

A bomb blooming.

Why would we trust? And who?

My teacher? Our mothers?

E and I blow smoke rings, climb the levee’s edge, dizzy with heat,

and should we not love the easy promise

of the world’s end

we half-believe in?

 River Trash

Crossing River Road, over the levee, to the water’s edge.

Here is a tree, storm-felled, here a stained mattress with roses.

As always, when I’m home I walk off my restless sadness, my mother-missing.

Recliner lodged in mud. Sheet of shattered glass.

The river crosses ten states, ends downstream of New Orleans. The deepest spot of the Mississippi is at Algiers Point, more than 200 feet

At the river’s margin—

Paddlefish. Bluegill. Shovelnose Sturgeon.

Shredded roof shingles. Bottle of Fireball.

Crape Myrtle. Pokeweed.

I imagine dropping my body into the cold dark water in Algiers, then finding my mother at the river bottom.

Fork crushed in dirt. Pair of orange earbuds.

I tell myself I walk the levee because the river sharpens the world, river that is drift.

River a corridor for migratory birds.

Yet on my walk back to my father’s house switchgrass flashes gold.