02/02/2026
"If you have writers block, lower your standards.” That's a piece of wisdom from Nicole Cooley from over sixteen years ago when I celebrated her book BREACH. That piece of advice never left me!
Twenty years of PoemoftheWeek.com drops on Valentine's Day 2026 with Madville Publishing--preorder here: https://shorturl.at/lgp4k
In celebration of its imminent arrival, this week I'm celebrating Nicole Cooley all over again. Read Nicole's poem as well as her wisdom on writing through the hard times. Then give her some love and treat yo SMELF to the book here: https://shorturl.at/lgp4k I promise it won't let you down!
04-05-09
Nicole Cooley
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.
-from Breach, celebrated with permission of the poet
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.
