Recto, Verso​

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A seam in the dirt divides past from present: rope I once set down in the sand of the levee, or the girls asleep with me between them, as if the three of us will ever again be a single body. In bed, the girls now only want stories that forecast their presence. I should tell how I brought them, after the storm, to the other city, how we stood between the levee and my parents’ house, on River Road, how we walked along the floodwall, tangled branches, dirt dried and yellow-rusted while the river was still silvering, a clench of sunlight. I wouldn’t let them touch the trees, the rocks, the sticks. I carried them in my arms.

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Make this scene a book open on a table—The dirt, The water. A page we turned. A page ripped out. The present. The past: mud bank, river’s splintered light, the crystal birch, a boy who tried to ground himself in my body. The time before the time before I lost the borders of myself. Spanish moss knotted over tree limbs, and I stood up, I walked away –

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In bed, now, here are two pages joined together. I hold my girls and try to remember. Girls who won’t remember this, how I am pressed between them like a leaf on tracing paper.

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-Nicole Cooley, Breach. Louisiana State University Press, 2010.