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Of Shock

Nicole Cooley

Sudden blow bundle of grain a surprise a heap of sheaves
meaning trade
with the Dutch

A thick mass of your hair on the brush in the pillow in my
mouth

When an electric current passes through all or part of the body

How I wish to collide violently with myself

To throw troops into confusion by charging at them

The shock of cold water the shock of wedding cake shoved in
my mouth

Stuttering heartbeat felt by a hand on the chest wall

A knife in a light socket

Pile or stack of unthreshed corn

And what is myself without you

Push your hair into my mouth

Will you collide violently with me

Will you be a decision inflicted upon my body

A bundle unthreshed and untethered

The shock of

Jar impact collapse

Flash of my white nightgown in our dark yard

Nicole Cooley. Photo credit: Victor Balaban. — Photo credit: Victor Balaban

Nicole Cooley's first book of poetry, Resurrection (Louisiana State University Press, 1996), was chosen by Cynthia Macdonald to receive the 1995 Walt Whitman Award.

About Nicole Cooley

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About this Poem

“‘Of Shock’ is from a new series of poems I am writing that invoke and intervene with dictionary definitions, poems that start with abstractions and then go somewhere else, poems that reverse my usual impulse to begin with an image. I love working on these poems because they force me back to the materiality of language and return me to the childhood pleasure in words, while at the same time helping me to work with subject matter that otherwise lies buried.”
—Nicole Cooley

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My Daughter Quarantined in the Basement

daughter I can’t see daughter once of padlocked diary stickered with hearts
sewing machine given by my mother of bundled yarn

embroidery hoop she cross-stitches in blue Fuck this shit
of springform pan daughter of 3-layer chocolate cakes

with meticulous design daughter wishing for a separate life
for space from me as she should at 17

Nicole Cooley

2021

Trash [Good you are trashing …]

Good you are trashing, my husband says, when I send him a photo
of a plastic fork and an N95 I found on the ground beside
the closed down library. And I know he wonders why I disappear
for hours, walking the streets of nearby towns. Walking
is the only way to be reliably alone, though how I miss bodies,
shoulder to shoulder on the E-train, that press and discomfort.

Nicole Cooley

2021

Trash [is a terrible metaphor …]

is a terrible metaphor, for poetics, for women’s bodies, for the street I lived on as a child. Smashed cigarette. Ripped surgical mask. Dropped piece of bread. At the edge of JFK Memorial Parkway, once the tree-lined Morris Canal, I drench my fingers in sanitizer after touching no one and think of Andre Breton’s Nadja, book I read in Visionary Fictions class in college, how the male narrator walked Boulevard Bon Nouvelle all night. How he met the young woman for whom the book is titled.

Nicole Cooley

2021

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Of Shock

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