#nicole cooley

[geryone]

The Afflicted Girls, Nicole Cooley

[contremineur]

It rains, il pleut, all over my grounds. It blows, le vent, the treetops around. I love mon papillon as she’s waking up among twisted sheets; I love ma belle as she grinds beans for our morning cup. Cher vent, come sow your thoughts in the ground. Bring us de l’eau, coarse trees, fresh streets, white lies—old hat under these new skies.

Nicole Cooley, La vie

Another one cut and pasted (or laboriously typed out) in my virtual commonplace book years ago – any thoughts on source or better credits greatly appreciated…

[rotgospels]

Nicole Cooley, Good Friday, Alice Liddell

[lifeinpoetry]

My body is its own shipwreck. / No map. No vision of the shore.

Nicole Cooley, from “Self-portrait with Morning Sickness,” Milk Dress

[lifeinpoetry]

​I rip up the notebooks scrawled in the midst of the first deep grief and retype and tell myself that I am now more dispassionate. Yet I want a record of the words. Looking over my notes written in class on a James Joyce essay we read last spring. “How can my mother be dead be dead be dead” I wrote and wrote and wrote.

—  Nicole Cooley, from “At the Florence Nightingale Museum,” published in Foundry

[lifeinpoetry]

Today's History Lesson: It swallows and swallows and swallows.

Nicole Cooley, from “September Notebook,” Breach

[lifeinpoetry]

sent home from school for wearing open-toed shoes sent home from school for a halter roped too loosely over my neck sent home from school because I wore leggings instead of pants sent home and told to change out of that too short skirt sent home because of spaghetti straps sent home to my mother because there was dress code inspection and your daughter is not in accordance

Now the mother I wish for a whalebone corset spun tight— the always desired 20-inch wasp waist— yet I wish to hold the edges of my mini skirt in my own hands, to allow whoever I want beneath it.

— Nicole Cooley, from Frozen Charlottes, A Sequence

[lifeinpoetry]

When I go back to childhood, my hands shake with cold

and American Beauty is forever a young girl, who lies on an ice bed,

already numb and anesthetized and blank.

— Nicole Cooley, from “The Cocktail, A History,” Girl After Girl After Girl