Out my kitchen window, no pink corridor of smoke.
Along my daughters’ walk to school, redbud trees, native to this state, also known as flamethrowers.
Five miles away, in Newark, the sky above Raymond Boulevard blooms with the discard, the abandoned, rubbish—
No, those are not the right words.
Behind the rail station, where the tracks cross and separate, in a rowhouse another mother slices toast, slips a body into a diaper, snaps a ponytail in place.
What’s burned: trash trucked in from New York City. And my town.
Behind the train station—each morning the sky turns violet.
The sky turns into a purple plume event. Here is the wrong language again making it beautiful.
What’s burned: Styrofoam, cardboard, mashed plastic bags.
A mother’s sliver of rage at the sky, the ground, the cloud of smoke.
What’s burned: iodine, mesh bandages, surgical disinfectant.
A baby turns in her crib in fever, hair clotted to her neck, while the city burns.
Once I wrote, the sky an inky wash of pink, and immediately crossed that out.
At my desk, I map the distance between the incinerator and the other children’s school.
Sky pink of cut meat.
What’s burned: particulate matter, nitrogen oxide—also called Nox.
Sky pink as a rubber bulb of baby Tylenol I once shot into my girl’s hot tight cheek—
Nicole Cooley grew up in New Orleans and is the author of seven books of poems, most recently Mother Water Ash. She is a professor in the MFA program in creative writing and literary translation at Queens College, City University of New York.
