Milk Dress

Nicole Cooley

• Publisher: Alice James Books
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781948579988
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

In this cool, manifold chronicle of motherhood, Nicole Cooley tackles the experience of creation, occupying a new vernacular of love within danger. Her poems—animate self-reflections of both merged bodies and violent separation—confront the turbulence of fear and safety.

Disaster, an Instruction Manual

Keep them from the news. Turn off the television.

Never let them see the computer screen in your study
with its images of smoke or water or ash.

Always whisper when you talk to your husband in the
kitchen or your sister on the phone.

After school, while I slice apple, pour sippy cups of milk, Meridian sits at the table, construction paper fanned across its surface. She scratches her crayon hard on the paper. There’s a hurricane in Arcadia’s town, and I’m trying to save her.

Disaster: from the Italian, disastro, meaning “ill-starred,” from dis—“away, without,” and astro, “star, planet” from the Latin.

My father stands in the late fall dark of our backyard in New Jersey with a pack of matches. Look, he says, and lights up the MRE, military-issued food he and my mother were given by the National Guard.

My daughters are watching from the back steps. I want to imagine the scene is somehow lovely, a shower of sparkles in the backyard grass.

Five minutes after leaving the apartment, my husband calls home from a pay phone. Someone just told me there’s been a plane crash at the World Trade Center. Turn on the TV.

In the rocking chair, my daughter on my lap, breastfeeding her before I leave, my first reaction is grip her so tightly she wakes up and begins to cry.

Disaster: mischance, misfortune, misadventure, mishap

Disaster: a total failure

You want to go down to New Orleans but you can’t. It’s not just that they won’t let anyone in the city—no rentry is allowed—but you can’t leave your children.

You want to save your parents but you can’t. All you can do is watch the news, the city filling like a bowl.

Disaster: a calamitous event; a sudden loss of life; a business failure

How to make it beautiful? How to keep them safe?

We can’t have another child, I tell my husband.

On the N-train, potassium iodide tablets safely stashed in my book bag, next to the books of poetry I plan to teach in class, I sit in my plastic seat trying not to look at anyone around me. If you see something, say something, the posters entreat. As if it is important to be suspicious of everyone around you, at all times, but at the same time not to look too closely at them.

Disaster, now obsolete: an unfavorable aspect of a star or planet.

The morning of the hurricane, I placed my last phone call with my parents. We all knew Katrina would be a direct hit, and it would likely be a Category Five storm. You have got to leave, I told them. Go to the Superdome. They would not listen.

The truth is, I know now, it was already far too late for them to leave the city.

How to turn it into a lesson?

Disaster, an alphabet: act of God, adversity, affliction, bad luck, bad news, bale, bane, blight, blow, bust, calamity, casualty, cataclysm, catastrophe, collapse, collision, crash, debacle, defeat, depression, emergency, exigency, failure, fall, fell stroke, fiasco, flood, flop, grief, hard luck, harm, hazard, holocaust, hot water, ill luck, misadventure, mischance, misfortune, mishap, reverse, rock, rough, ruin, ruination, setback, slip, stroke, the worst, tragedy, undoing, upset, washout, woe.

Green Sandbox, Winter Sky

In the middle of the yard, my daughter fills her dress with
sand as if she can ground herself in the earth

I watch her from the cracked back step while the baby
waits in me undone unfinished unready

I want to believe in language fastening each moment to
the present

Her turtle sandbox I anchored with stones
her gingham dress

She sifts dead grass through her fingers under the sky
white as paper where nothing is written

The driveway’s black macadam lawn filmed with milk

Here is a scene in which I can’t plot ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Note to the Reader
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Dedication
• Homeland Security
• Self-portrait with Morning Sickness
• [The cloth mother is heated]
• Pregnant at the Archive
• Triage Sonnet
• Amniocentesis
• [The mother and fetus]
• Cesarean
• Three Documentaries
• Suspicion
• Firstborn
• In the Blue Exam Book After the Birth Because I Was Told to Write Everything Down
• Grief as Is
• [The eight newborn monkeys]
• Stabat Mater, Fragments
• Couplets Toward the Future
• Overlaying
• [Always a murmur of Betadine and florescence]
• Pedagogy, 2001
• [The dye would be injected]
• The Last Quatrains in the Ballad of the Bad Mother
• Damage Has Its Own Vocabulary
• Weaning
• Suitcase
• Disaster, an Instruction Manual
• Green Sandbox, Winter Sky
• Objects in a Box for Class
• [It’s unmothering Sunday]
• Breastfeeding at the Harvard Club
• Three Documentaries
• Milk
• Hour of the Pink Flashlight
• [Which is a rope]
• Dress on a Wire Hanger with Ink, Wax, Thread
• Recto, Verso
• Ghazal of Nines
• Milk Dress
• In the Anatomical Museum
• [A sliver of dread]