Talking Trash

Nicole Cooley’s poem “Mother Trash” appeared in AGNI 100.

I have spent the last several years talking trash in poems.

Since 2020, I’ve been working on a manuscript that looks at our leavings from a personal perspective as well a historically researched one.

Here’s how the collection, “Trash,” started. In spring 2020, as the pandemic set in, I began to take long, obsessive walks. Walking for hours in New Jersey, I began to pay attention to what was left behind, as a way of keeping myself anchored to the world. I listed found objects in my notes app, then started writing poems. I quickly felt, however, that the project demanded something more.

If I was writing about trash, I needed to investigate its history. The Covanta incinerator in Newark burns five miles from my house. Beside my office in Queens is the landfill buried under Flushing Meadows Park. I learned that the U.S. is the world’s largest producer of garbage, and that our country’s reliance on incinerators, landfills, and oceans, where islands of our discarded plastic spin and merge, contributes enormously to climate change. Writing about trash in 2025 demands a reckoning with the past, even more urgently when we consider the acceleration in recent years of floods, fires, and warming.

Here is how the book took shape. After I wrote several personal poems about walking and staring at the ground during the height of the pandemic, and after I wrote a long middle section about the history of trash collection and disposal around New York City, I returned to try a different kind of poem. One of these, from the new manuscript, is “Mother Trash.”

“Mother Trash” merges personal, social, and historical modes. It starts with a terrible discovery. The day after my mother’s death in March 2018, my sister and I discovered, in a closet, seventy-two cartons of cigarettes that she’d stashed away. Our mother was a chain-smoker who’d repeatedly said she’d never stop, even if she got sick, and all of us are sure her smoking led to her sudden death that night in March. Pulling the green-and-white cartons off her top closet shelf, we couldn’t understand why she’d hidden them when she smoked openly and constantly. We filled several black contractor’s bags with the cigarettes and dumped them in the trash—wasteful, we knew, but we didn’t want anyone else smoking them. My mother’s unsmoked cigarettes were now trash.

That image has haunted me for years, and it merges in my memory with other parts of my mother’s life and my life as her daughter. The fact that she lived, and I grew up, two blocks from the Mississippi River in Louisiana. The fact that when she died her journals were missing and all we found was a digital file. The fact that my mother had told me, after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast in 2005, “I will die in this house.”

These personal details and images swirled together with details of the environmental crisis in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast. Ever since high school, when I took a yearlong course called “Louisiana Ecology,” I’ve researched and tried to understand what climate change is doing to the region. After nearly losing her house and her life in Katrina, my mother became even more wedded to the landscape of New Orleans, so the shock of her death naturally brought the subject forward again. River Road, beside my parents’ house, leads to the infamous “Cancer Alley.” The Mississippi is not only full of chemical runoff but increasingly also a “saltwater wedge.” The coast is eroding at an alarming rate.

Where did my mother’s cigarettes end up? Burned or in a landfill or dumped in a river? What is the connection between my personal experience and the larger landscapes of New Orleans and New York City? Why does writing about grief take me back to garbage? “Mother Trash” explores all of these questions. The manuscript gave me another place to grieve.