Coco Seney
Coco Seney is a poet based in Houston, with roots in Kansas City and Chicago. She is completing her debut chapbook, Going Back for the Girls, shaped through the CharlotteLit Chapbook Lab in mentorship with poet Nickole Brown. Her work centers women’s interior worlds—what is shared in bar bathrooms, carried in bodies, and learned over time. Her poems ask how human pastness might be sacred, preserving memory through the retracing of girlhood, millennial culture, and ghost lives. Seney works in innovation and entrepreneurship, holds a BA from Rice University and an MBA from the University of Virginia. Find her @ReadCoco.
Blackboards
Red apples are like red apples.
Can you see it when you close your eyes?
And tell me, what’s that like?
I can see the word, recall the fruit I once tasted
in the white kitchen my mother had just cleaned.
Can you see the red of the Red Delicious?
When the teacher told me to close my eyes and imagine
I could see the blackboard of my mind: fogged out,
chalky residue, static cling. Bored at school, unawares
most kids could vacation,
conjure in their mind’s eye—
white sands beneath turquoise waters.
How neat! But me? Blackboards
when I stared straight ahead. Blackboards
when I closed my eyes. A small world,
my imagination boarded up, no light in the closet.
They call it aphantasia, the inability to visualize.
Sounds like Fantasia, a film where colors explode
into being, unlike the galleys of my voided mind,
starless as the Mariana Trench.
I desperately clung to sounds, to words,
to the thicket of a word like trench.
How it traps you between its teeth.
Something I could grip into meaning.
So apples became ideas, then profound statements
about belief grounded in a story I learned to write faster
than I could speak. Concepts, they called it.
But what about the apples? I go back to the kitchen,
my mother telling me to be careful carving thin slices
with a dull butter knife, dinner simmering before dad’s home.
It all happened, so I can tell you about the waxy skin,
the red darkened like a shadow, a picture
as clear as I’ll get out.
To the Daughter I Don’t Have
I’d tell her this is how I did it:
I picked the night, I picked the boy.
He was kind and liked me fine.
I picked the story.
It was a Christmas party, early December.
I wore an elf costume and face glitter.
Bad Romance blared. I led him upstairs
by the hand into his room.
The bed was made; the idea
pitched. And just like that,
it happened.
Glitter shed, I bled. Had to run
down the stairs, out the door.
Before midnight, that box
was checked.
My friends taxied home
with me, called it a victory,
still called me Coco. My father
still called me Woopy.
Understand? Keep and lose
what you choose.
It may not be love, or even imaginable.
How the sheets may feel cool,
their hands damp, your body
learning. How the bed of grass
may feel damper yet, ants roaming.
How crickets may watch in symphony.
The backseat, as good as any.
Don’t say sorry for the blood,
leave proof of you in the letting.
Stay with yourself,
strong when expected to be weak.