Girl after Girl after Girl

Poems

Nicole Cooley

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780807166857
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

The poems in Girl after Girl after Girl celebrate the connections between mothers and daughters from generation to generation. Through an acknowledgment of mothers' unconditional love, the memories evoked by physical objects, and the stories mothers pass down, these poems explore the common thread that stretches backward and forward, running through the lives of women and binding them together in an unbroken chain of years.

II.
Of Saving

of preservation from danger or destruction

—a cold glass doorknob like a fist—

of economizing

of being a good housekeeper!

once upon a time, a husband forced a wife’s jaws apart
and poured in cool thin dimes
until she suffocated on her own money

of redeeming

of a lie like a hand covering a mouth

Resurrection Cake

Stir Jack Daniels, a pinch of salt, two sticks of butter, boxed cake mix
and canned fruit cocktail—

Pour more whiskey over the surface of the cake.

My grandmother crossing Western Avenue in Chicago on her way out of a bakery.
An accident: from accidere, to befall.

A leopard-print scarf to loop over her shoulders.

Bake in a Bundt cake pan, arrange
an empty grave, hill
for toothpick crosses, parsley trees.
With your best fondant, make Jesus’ robe discarded.
Drop it near the empty place.

A no-bake version can be made with cereal and melted marshmallows.

My grandmother holding a white box full of what?—it is invisible—crullers,
cookies, sweet rolls.

My grandmother dead in an instant. Later at the bakery, the baker tells me,
I want you to know I stayed with her and whispered to her till the ambulance came.

Box. Purse. She called it her pocketbook.

Also called The Empty Tomb Cake.

Inside her purse found later: leather low-heeled pumps kept never worn.
Inside: photo of her husband who died in 1955.

Also called—She is not here.

I slide the cake in the oven. I stand beside her.

I’m holding a white box twined shut and stinking of sugar.

Floating Island

Whisking egg whites with two cold spoons with my daughter, in the kitchen,
the whites, most grotesque, most drawn-from-a-body, much worse

than yolks. The recipe requires meringue stiffened
into peaks that startle, that most resemble breasts.

My girl’s bare feet beside mine on the black and white floor
while she scalds milk to thicken, slowly.

Do not let it form a skin, the recipe warns. What could live
inside milk skin? A scab, a patch of hair.

Also called Eggs in Snow. Also called Birds Milk.

I want to layer alcohol-soaked dessert biscuits secretly inside
but we are making a dessert to serve to daughters.

In the cookbook’s photo, the Floating Island is a place
where I could rest, undisturbed, on a bed of egg whites, cool and dreamy,

like a pool of thin stretchy cervical mucus, to test ovulation,
—I can’t have another baby, I explain—and then all the women I’ll never be

line up beside me, aproned, wedding-dressed, tattooed.
With immersion blenders, apple corers, electric frying pans.

Also called Ile Flottante. In Serbia: En Senockle.

And under the milk skin is a baby, a baby I could pick up, hold,
swallow, my Thumbelina, my sweet homunculus,

who floats inside me like a piece of half-chewed gum.
The recipe warns, Place the result in a very hot oven and don’t take

your eyes off it. Never, ever, take your eyes off any of it.

At the Corning Museum of Glass

First cake baked in glass

In the photograph, the other mother slits it
open proudly: her cake baked in a sawed-off

battery jar. At the table, her daughters
smile, toast the invention of the temperature tolerant.
A triangle slice for each: make your wartime meals
the best you’ve ever tasted!

I study the other mother’s children while my daughter
jerks herself out of my arms, runs past me down the hall.

end of the first year
end of layette now kept in a box in a basement
end of tiny hospital t-shirts
end of the socks that could fit on my finger
end of milk needling through my skin

“Go away!” my daughter screams when I catch her as she buries
her head in my lap.

In the photograph of the test kitchen I learn

that a cookbook holds more than a million recipes for glass,

written by good wife after good wife.

Pyrex is best:
add a frit of silicate, sand, soda
and ground lime.

Downstairs I follow my daughter—
a wake of cries and tantrumming and
an assembly line of baby bottles
winds before me like
a long sentence.

A glass dress from the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exposition

Glass fibers break when touched, when a mother
angles the dress over a daughter’s shoulders.

Dress of pain the mother put on the daughter.
Dress prickling, needling.

all the daughter’s first year:
cold spoon I held against her gums for teething
on her milk-blistered lips

At the glass-blowing show, beside me, on the bench,
her shoes knock my legs, over and over
as we watch a glass river run through with light.

I watched her, newborn, to keep her breathing,
in a room lit pink like the bubble of glass
spinning before us now, iridescent,

pale and shimmering as the inside of a mouth, and how I wish
I could swallow her back down—this baby who is not a baby walking,
bring her back into my body, into that bubble of glass where she lived,

too hot, too still, too safe.

[Coral Rattle, 1650]

I picture the rattle on a silver-pink beach.

Lozenges of yellow light on the sea.

Sand sagging the toddler’s pull-up.

Hurt me, my daughter says knowing nothing

about hurt while the sea hisses and spits at the shoreline.

Coral will stop gums bleeding. Coral will quit the crying.

Booklet, Hand-Pressed Paper, Containing
Locks of Schoolchildren’s Hair

Girls’ hair wound on a b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• I. Of Collection
• II. Of Saving
• III. Of Escape
• IV. Of Keeping