‘We Thought About It’
— Reneé Bibby
There is no heartache in the world like family. Sarah Cooper’s ‘We Thought About It’ is a poem about the whirlpool-sibling: the broken, electric person pulling everyone else in a twisting downward vortex that may drown them all. The sibling who’s fucked up too many times, burned through too much forgiveness, but can’t be cast out, not yet. Cooper manages to hold two threads in the poem, the story of the addicted-sibling embedded within the narrative of the wounded-sibling. She is as forthright with the addicted-sibling’s transgressions as she is tender with the addicted-sibling’s humanness and vulnerability, so that the reader can understand the conflicted anguish of a sibling who must make a choice, to cut free from the whirlpool or drown.