Waterbaby. Nikki Wallschlaeger
wiring.
That spark is no good.
Come sit with me for a
minute. My feet full of
diluted axe fluid.
Thought I heard you say
everything is medicine.
But that’s just hearin
what you wanna hear
This Body Keeps the Keys
My dear sparkly-eyed polyps,
I don’t have enough juice to
be the sole joist of this family
today,
so I dream of claw-foot tubs
where I splash unapologetic
on how deep this umbilical gets
slumped from getting over,
hair unwashed, toenails randy
as hell because I am sincerely
mothered the fuck out, so tired,
this mothering body,
shellac lying facedown on a
coastline ashing & mottled
pockmarked canker sorrel
no good pictures of myself.
Skinbag workhorse bb creamery,
constant upkeep of management
cultivation of self-care cosmetic
Black pride goddess goddamn!
This shit gets tiresome putting so
much effort into what doesn’t last,
sometimes I want to retire shave
my head be a nun or a monk,
just so I can forget all the years
time bludgeoned so I could look like
somebody else swimming around
in their own pallid wheel of tears.
Yemaya, what is to become of us.
I drag my body around lovingly but
it still won’t let me go
Dirt Floor
for May Ayim (1960–1996)
The overseers are buried aboveground in containers that won’t
incinerate, and the workers who made the stones to fit their bodies,
dead from lung disease, are stalked by the heavy, wet coughs of their
bosses.
In the shaky global clay, the coral reefs are dying from pneumonia. My
grandfather packed crates of blank tombstones at the granite quarry
for a living and the sea being what it is speaks of these connections. I
know when I’m being haunted,
I know when I’m being asked. So we search together through the
trenches of buried papers, brown women shoveling, worried for the
health of our backs. We are a bouquet of spines pressed into the
dirt floor, gathered in strength for you, so you can rest here without
loneliness.
Valley of Things
Hang your head when you walk
yesterday’s news is greener
to survive ham with ideas
of a common holiness
decisions to make about
what’s going to siphon
off your thoughts
fuse giddiness to
the citizen elective
creature by creature
when a very young child
throws down an object
it’s beautiful to watch
they don’t know about
the value of thingification
hanging over the riverbanks
a good poet prays to nature
I brush out tangles during
graceful animal hunting season
sometimes we hear a crush
figure out a daily schedule
read tortured philosophers
listen to James Booker on repeat
Black Woman on a Plane, Twenty-First Century
Minutiae in a bowl,
jury-rigged hand
in need of a drink.
The flight attendant
said, “It’s on me,”
I must’ve looked
like I needed one.
Such a rough climb,
wobbly as the sun
during Leo season.
Come to find out
a brand new plane
is hot to handle.
The first breath,
crucial, coughs.
My favorite path
of looking winds up
when I’m in the air.
There’s no way
to vacuum-seal death
up here I suppose,
even though I’ve never
felt the urge to buy
a traveling pillow.
If something develops,
if our machine defects,
I’ll ask if I can hold
the hand of the woman
who gave me a drink.
Then it’s time to land
like nothing happened,
the captain standing
at the door with his crew.
He’s younger than I am,
a baby-faced white boy.
We don’t know his name,
or where he came from.
Prayer Sonnet
Sewn up again in a data harvest meadow
moving through me as pelvic bowl thunder
to learn how to laugh at their indifference
Revenge of the Chattel is not being shown in
the popular gendarme art houses
blood heavy as the iron binding us together
Public