Waterbaby. Nikki Wallschlaeger

Catfish

       Just Because We’re Scared Doesn’t Mean We’re Wrong

       Mosquitoland

       All Dogs Go to Heaven

       Black Woman in a Bathtub, Twenty-First Century

       Anti-Elegy

       Take a Seat

       Lullaby

       Birthday

       Ars Poetica on a Twenty-Dollar Bill

       Mother of Thousands

       About the Author

       Books by Nikki Wallschlaeger

       Acknowledgments

       Copyright

       Special Thanks

      WATERBABY

      Nobody Special

      Pick up my candles and dust them

      I don’t know when the spirits get in

      housework is done by nobody special

      that’s the way it’s always been

      Been working since I was a babe

      I come home now and work for free

      housework is done by nobody special

      that’s the way it’s always been

      I’m nobody special, nobody special

      a washerwoman serving the cream

      homemade confetti ready for them

      playing with what they think of me

      I’m nobody special, nobody special

      seamstresses weaving our chains

      no day off in a month of Novembers

      busy making overalls for your gain

      Dress up my candles and light them

      I have a long long night ahead of me

      housework is done by nobody special

      that’s the way it’s always been

      Been working before I was born

      mother waiting on tables with me

      housework is done by nobody special

      that’s the way it’s always been

      I’m nobody special, nobody special

      waiting for some answers tonight

      hoping somebody will hear me out

      while the light keeps flickering, flickering

      Middle Passage Messaging Service

       for Wanda Coleman (1946–2013)

      A word is an old story. One word, many stories,

      one body, many bodies. To this day they move

      across our line break lives & before we are

      archived, lungs crackle with smoke until words

      form in the long struggle smuggled on impact,

      a thunderstorm bites & my world is a prayer

      with a moon & all the birds from way back but

      my throat is a blue cache of contraband winds,

      when it’s brutal please help keep our language

      thriving on big mama river is the word maroon.

      Forbidden trees storages of lives pressed page

      flowers herbs in their barbarian jailships on the

      horizon bones shake with births & coughing,

      keeping it down catching sick on the landform.

      In life I live in the cold foliage of their unreason,

      walking pneumonia drowned stories struggle,

      silent memoirs, the cooking stoves are loaded

      on the horizons cargo & people to this day

      they run the sea months mouths housetraps.

      Tearin the roof off this cold cruel mothafucka

      outside the towers of excess is fluid smoking,

      language tundra rumbling running ear nose

      & throats tarsus tomes winking out of their

      power plants, good & plenty different worlds

      tearjerkers crybabies they got no memories

      of their own cruelty waterlogged lifesickness.

      To cry so hard is to laugh to laugh so hard

      is to cry writing with the smoke is the word,

      is an old story of our lives of the horizons in my

      mouth, I bite the stories that drowned me in

      their books with a moon & our real stories.

      We live within the fugitivity of a thunderstorm,

      lung-red caches formed from struggle from

      walking from counting the siq seas mouthing

      directions the language cargo of Black code.

      We got all the words for how we got here,

      where we are going & how we will get there.

      All Kinds of Fires inside Our Heads

      The number of bodies I have

      is equal to the number of

      gurney transfers that are

      televised.

      If we’re all “just human”

      then who is responsible?

      A fire station drying out

      from addiction. Outside

      the drizzling of firepower,

      lowballing suns.

      It’s like a sauna in here,

      the strain of a charred

      bladder. Bottled