Trash by Nicole Cooley

Trash

When I walk during the pandemic, I study trash. First day

of school, no children on the street, high school shuttered. I wear

my dead mother’s raincoat. No one likes when I call her my dead mother.

Just say your mother, my husband tells me. The Garden State Parkway rushes

like a river and I pretend it’s the Mississippi and my mother is alive

in her New Orleans house. When I walk, I don’t listen

to podcasts or audio books like so many of my friends. I strive to 

pay attention (so I can succeed at one thing during the pandemic). 

I study sidewalk trash. Trash: late 14c, thing of little use or value, waste,

refuse, dross.  Empty cigarette pack. Vodka bottle the size

of a finger.  Pink plastic baby barrette. The past we lived in with our daughters

is a museum exhibit: here I am at the edge of the Gulf,

younger girl and I dredged in sand, sitting in green waves.

In my black boots—quarantine fashion—I have worn through August

because I am committed to the idea that there was no summer,

I study a dead possum at the curb, its mouth curled open.  All my

walking these months has made me restless and I can’t sit at my desk.

Walking tethers me to the earth. Or it doesn’t. I walk 

and remember debris those weeks after Katrina—contents of houses

spilled and dark with mildew on the streets—as I drove

through New Orleans with my mother. A refrigerator studded 

with school portraits. Face of a metal fan. Slab of wallboard.

My mother’s death is a weight on my chest, which I know

is how she felt the night she died.   As kids, we dumped 

dumped our garbage—candy wrappers, TAB cans—into storm drains.  

Everyone I knew in  New Orleans did. Didn’t we see

our trash was swept straight to the waterways? Trash: old Norse

tros rubbish, fallen leaves and twigs. On the stretcher my mother

looked so small. I walk Bloomfield Green—a spoon, a sandwich bag,

squirrel tail—and remember the waste—from the French, 

damage, destruction; wasteland, moor, from Latin vastum, empty, desolate—

that seeped into our New York apartment that September, ash, burned wire

and metal. I pass the church built at the end of the revolutionary war. 

And the cemetery, where so many stones read simply MOTHER.

Several times, on the sidewalk, I’ve found hair extensions, blonde and red, 

as if ripped from a woman’s head, and I have to stop myself from taking them,

wanting to save their intimacy.  Garbage, derives from food:

giblets, refuse of a fowl, waste parts of an animal. At the edge 

of the closed down high school, I stand beside the trash can, 

pocked with rust, take notes on my phone. I’m sweating in my mother’s coat.

Waste: a desert, wilderness  from the Latin. Consumption, 

depletion, also useless expenditure.  My notes do in fact feel useless.

Waste basket first recorded 1850, I transcribe. There’s no river or Gulf 

where I live now, but I’m always  underwater, moving through heavy

saltwater or muddy, dark sludge. I can’t give in  to my desire to subtract myself.  

Garbage: originally influenced by garble, mixed up, distorted, mutilated. 

Tethered. Untethered. A sweep of grief. What does it even mean 

to pay attention when I can’t keep anyone safe?

Trash

Paper has a direction and you must tear it right.

In my art class on Zoom, we are making Quarantine Books,

bound chapbooks from objects around the house. Because we can’t

leave our houses. Use office materials, the teacher says,

from her clean white studio in Germany, drenched in afternoon light.

Use old invoices. Use what you have on hand.

I photocopy my Louisiana marriage license, a daughter’s birth

certificate. I rip out pages of 1950s cookbooks from garage sales.

The teacher describes images as noisy which I love, as I stitch

a photo of a bowl of aspic and a woman in a lipstick pink apron,

waiting for her children at the table. We learn how to wax thread:

rub it over an unlit candle—before we sew a binding. My mother 

taught me to make everything from scratch, from clothes to bread to 

miniature beds, and I have always failed at this. Two months

into lockdown, I am determined to step outside myself and become 

a maker. To bind a signature of paper together, to saddle stitch

a book to open flat. The teacher says we should keep pandemic journals.

On my phone, I text to myself: track the daily. I will myself 

to believe in the power of remembrance. To document.

I am glad my mother is not here to see this world. I am sorry my daughters will.

Nicole Cooley grew up in New Orleans and 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). Her work has appeared most recently or is forthcoming in POETRY, SCOUNDREL TIME, PLUME and DIODE. She is the director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation at Queens College, City University of New York.