04-05-09

 

Nicole Cooley

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Romance

 

On the train to New Orleans my sister and I

light the Virgen de Guadalupe candles

and the line of unlucky women steps out from the flame.

 

They file past at the window where we sit,

where we have given up being safe from them,

our four aunts with their loose dresses for mourning,

 

their fasting, their silent refusals.  These women loved

their grief like the bread they would not let themselves eat,

like the children they would not allow into their bodies.

 

We know their unspoken lesson—take nothing

into the body.  We know they will wait for us,

a line of dolls cut from the same sheet of butcher paper,

 

the sister of this family linked by their hands and alone.

One mile into Mississippi, the train passes a statue

of blue-robed Mary in someone else’s yard, bathtubs leaning

 

against the wire fence.  I place us there.  With relief,

I lower each of us into the bath, into the crystal salts.

Oil pools on the surface of the water.  Sulfur is staining our skin.

 

The train drags on across the tracks, away from us,

leaving us in our own story.  My first aunt looks down

at the flat pan of her pelvis, strung tight between hipbones

 

she’ll never touch.  She likes her body empty and clean.

Coaxing her into the tub, we preach the virtues of this water,

its power to wash away sin.  The second one taps

 

her cigarette ash on the grass and blows smoke at the sky

while we plead with her about drowning,

tell her not to go all the way down.  Why should she listen?

 

We know how good the body can feel, unused, expecting

nothing.  But my sister and I are trying to prove them wrong.

When I kneel beside my family, I am desperate.

 

My sister drags the sign of the cross in the dirt

with a stick.  Why don’t we quit telling the story?

Once upon a time there were four princesses and a single

 

safe tower.  No prince.  In place of a man, a basket

of primroses they ripped into pieces, four finches

fighting it out for the kingdom.  In another story,

 

my sister and I take them all home to New Orleans.

I take them all into me, my secret collection.

I give up.  They live in my body.  Oh, we are beautiful.

 

In the real story, we are all starving together.  Sisters,

the wafer floats on my tongue like bad luck, like our name.

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-from Breach, celebrated with permission of the poet

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Poems should entertain, frighten, please, flatter, make us rethink and reframe, save the world, even. Because that is what’s true to the human experience. I like a poetry that, to paraphrase Whitman, can “contain multitudes.” Still, one of my writing teachers at Iowa said, “If you have writers block, lower your standards.” Hearing that was incredibly helpful. I realized that while I may not be capable of writing a good poem on a given day, I can write a bad one—which then of course might become something Whitman would claims contains those multitudes. I love telling my students this quote. They often look aghast.

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Nicole Cooley grew up in New Orleans, Louisiana. 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, Judy Garland, Ginger Love, two chapbooks, Frozen Charlottes, A Sequence, and Vanishing Point, and a collaborative artists’ book (with book artist Maureen Cummins), Salem Lessons.​​​