Waterbaby. Nikki Wallschlaeger

      

      Waterbaby

      NIKKI WALLSCHLAEGER

      Note to the Reader

      Copper Canyon Press encourages you to calibrate your settings by using the line of characters below, which optimizes the line length and character size:

      Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Pellentesque eu

      Please take the time to adjust the size of the text on your viewer so that the line of characters above appears on one line, if possible.

      When this text appears on one line on your device, the resulting settings will most accurately reproduce the layout of the text on the page and the line length intended by the author. Viewing the title at a higher than optimal text size or on a device too small to accommodate the lines in the text will cause the reading experience to be altered considerably; single lines of some poems will be displayed as multiple lines of text. If this occurs, the turn of the line will be marked with a shallow indent.

      Thank you. We hope you enjoy these poems.

      This e-book edition was created through a special grant provided by the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation.

       For Eileen (1928–2017)

      Losers, like autodidacts, always know much more than

      winners. If you want to win, you need to know just one thing

      and not to waste your time on anything else: the pleasures of

      erudition are reserved for losers. The more a person knows, the

      more things have gone wrong.

      UMBERTO ECO, NUMERO ZERO

      When I’m singing blues, I’m singing life.

      ETTA JAMES

      Contents

       Title Page

       Note to Reader

       Nobody Special

       Middle Passage Messaging Service

       All Kinds of Fires inside Our Heads

       This Body Keeps the Keys

       Dirt Floor

       Valley of Things

       Black Woman on a Plane, Twenty-First Century

       Prayer Sonnet

       Airport Security Playlist

       Jamais Vu State of Mind

       Women Are Doomed to Be the Angels of Love

       It’s a Daisy

       When the Devil Leads Us Home and Yells Surprise

       100-Year Flood

       Notes on the New Reconstruction

       Way of the Road

       Vertical View of a City

      ♦

       Blue Flame of July

       Astral Traveling Got Me F*cked Up

       Dead to the World Study #1

       William Shakespeare

       Robert Frost

       William Carlos Williams

       Dead to the World Study #2

       A Dying Mule Kicks the Hardest

      ♦

       Why Do I Feel So Old When I Look So Young

       American Children

       Dead to the World Study #3

       The Lunch Counter of Eternal Tears

       Fantastic Voyage

       Dead to the World Study #4

       Lost in America

       People Are Unbearably Docile

      ♦

       Crash Blue Sunday

       I’d Come Back from the Grave to Celebrate the End of Capitalism

       Butterfly on a Baby’s Head

       Cows in the Morning

       Lake Come and Gone

       Lonely in a Fundamental Way

       Further Notes on the