Waterbaby

by Nikki Wallschlaeger

Overview

In her astounding third collection, Nikki Wallschlaeger turns to water—the natural element of grief—to trace history’s interconnected movements through family, memory, and day-to-day survival. Waterbaby is a book about Blackness, language, and motherhood in America; about the ancestral joys and sharp pains that travel together through the nervous system’s crowded riverways; about the holy sanctuary of the bathtub for a spirit that’s pushed beyond exhaustion. Waterbaby sings the blues in every key, as Wallschlaeger uses her vibrant lexicon and varied rhythms to condense and expand emotion, hurry and slow meaning, communicating the profound simultaneity of righteous dissatisfaction with an unjust world, and radical love for what’s possible.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781619322370
Publisher:	Copper Canyon Press
Publication date:	04/13/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Nikki Wallschlaeger’s work has been featured in The Nation, Brick, American Poetry Review, Witness, Kenyon Review, Poetry, and others. She is the author of the full-length collections Houses (Horseless Press 2015) and Crawlspace (Bloof 2017) as well as the graphic book I Hate Telling You How I Really Feel (2019) from Bloof Books. She is also the author of an artist book called “Operation USA” through the Baltimore-based book arts group Container, a project acquired by Woodland Pattern Book Center in Milwaukee.

Read an Excerpt

Women Are Doomed to Be the Angels of Love

This is so true I involuntarily doodle hearts everywhere I go. I sign my letters compulsively with
hearts,

dream of disobedient hearts, work with hearts. I eat them. I boil sauces and the tomatoes on my
cutting board form a daisy chain heart. My foot is a pretty ballet slipper,

Lisa Frank style, engorged with crusty satin hearts. I pronounce my name with an
embarrassingly hearty accent. My colostrums pools with the plumping of an inflamed heart

inspired by the nutritional needs of my babies. Hearts are spray-painted on trains like talismans,
guiding me eventually to the Heart Afterlife where my treasured friends exist in heart time,

drinking wine and organizing a workers collective named Heavenly Valley Emotional Laborers in
the mossy hidden Heartclouds where my restless heart tires of hearing famous singers

singing sweetly about unsatisfying love in the grocery store when their hearts could be
screaming about environmental devastation and global capitalism;

the way this callous dorm pillow I saw online plastered with hearts and dream catchers says
“only good vibes” is in no way related to what the hearts of this country really need.

On good days I submit to being a committed student of the heart. On bad days I am paranoid
and anxious about my heart being kidnapped by intruders in blue uniforms,

and how a scene in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom where the sacrificial victim’s heart
gets ripped out in one of Hollywood’s stereotypical cinematic presentations of indigenous culture

nevertheless sent me a message about men who are so powerful they could take what they
wanted from my body with their bare hands.

“Where do bad folks go when they die?” asks Kurt Cobain on my favorite Nirvana album. I
replace “folks” with “hearts” and marvel at the candor of strange smarmy men on TV who want

to be president, who have no clue that being part of a community is different than owning
investments in a city. My heart is stone sore. My heart wants to close forever,

to protect me from market combat. But as someone bred for strength and openness I lack
options. I’m pretty good at the precarious art of choosing what gets in.

Doom makes a great gatekeeper,
it’s rainwater in a vase of roses on a sleeping hero’s grave.




Way of the Road

“He who builds by the roadside has many masters.” -- German proverb

I closed my eyes
so I didn’t have to
look at it anymore
when I opened my
eyes again it was still there
same raggedy recollections
but I was farther down the road
than the last time I was willing to rest.
The road is an exasperating concept.
I’d get sent to jail if I drove the car
off into a field of ragweed and chicory
but in my mind something resembling
freedom would spark until the highway
patrol came to take me away.
We’re tagged at birth with no excuses,
just follow it and swallow the signs.
Once when I was a child
I was eating with Grandma at a
hamburger joint in Wausau, WI
when out of the blue someone drove
a car into the side of the building.
Turns out it was an old white man
who thought he had his foot
on the brake instead of the gas.
.A cop arrived as we left certain
the mystical fidelity of insurance
would fix everything, the white man
having been born with an excuse.
It is not an exceptional day.
Almost every car we’ve passed
is either a truck or a SUV.
I feel ugly looking at them.
When crossing the street it’s
advised to look both ways before
moving, these are lessons we’re
required to learn in elementary school.
Another one is never to accept rides
from strangers. Serial killers wait
in the wings of on-ramps
scarfing down packs
of pixie sticks while
listening to AM radio.
It’s rare I can remember
names of officers. Blueberries
cherries, fruits for the damned.
You need to finish up your blunts
and crotch the weed immediately
when you see one around you.
On the other side of the highway
bags are unpacked, and German
shepherd dogs bark and mildew
over my overstuffed bladder
buried underneath a rest stop.
The past looks to the future
with a portly film over its eye.
A sack of goldfish breaks
in the centerline and when
you get too close it's gone.
Recollections of dashed memories,
or reflections from a new mirage?
Either way the sirens are enlisted
to stare when we don't belong,
(and they're right, we don't)
so I close my eyes again
and when I reopen them,
we’ve arrived at our destination.
It's the grocery store parking lot
and they're having a sale on
end of season vegetable starters



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 clawfoot 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 get 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

Table of Contents

Nobody Special 3

Middle Passage Messaging Service 7

All Kinds of Fires inside Our Heads 9

This Body Keeps the Keys 10

Dirt Floor 12

Valley of Things 13

Black Woman on a Plane, Twenty-First Century 14

Prayer Sonnet 17

Airport Security Playlist 18

Jamais Vu State of Mind 19

Women Are Doomed to Be the Angels of Love 20

It's a Daisy 22

When the Devil Leads Us Home and Yells Surprise 24

100-Year Flood 26

Notes on the New Reconstruction 28

Way of the Road 30

Vertical View of a City 33

Blue Flame of July 37

Astral Traveling Got Me F*cked Up 41

Dead to the World Study #1 42

William Shakespeare 43

Robert Frost 44

William Carlos Williams 45

Dead to the World Study #2 46

A Dying Mule Kicks the Hardest 47

Why Do I Feel So Old When I Look So Young 51

American Children 55

Dead to the World Study #3 56

The Lunch Counter of Eternal Tears 57

Fantastic Voyage 58

Dead to the World Study #4 59

Lost in America 60

People Are Unbearably Docile 61

Crash Blue Sunday 65

I'd Come Back from the Grave to Celebrate the End of Capitalism 69

Butterfly on a Baby's Head 71

Cows in the Morning 72

Lake Come and Gone 74

Lonely in a Fundamental Way 75

Further Notes on the New Reconstruction 76

Catfish 78

Just Because We're Scared Doesn't Mean We're Wrong 79

Mosquitoland 80

All Dogs Go to Heaven 82

Black Woman in a Bathtub, Twenty-First Century 83

Anti-Elegy 84

Take a Seat 86

Lullaby 87

Birthday 88

Ars Poetica on a Twenty-Dollar Bill 89

Mother of Thousands 91

About the Author 93

Interviews

Apogee Journal: What does it mean to write a poem about exhaustion?
NW: The exhaustion that caregivers experience, particularly in the case of women, is as old as the white cisheteropatriarchy that demands we do this with gratitude without pay, that black women were happy being slaves who took care of the children of their lazy violent white oppressors. It’s extremely important that the narratives of mothers and caregivers are centered. For centuries, we were silenced. Now it’s time to listen and appreciate what we’ve seen and what we’ve given. Audre Lorde has wrote extensively and advocated for the lives of black and brown women that were taken for granted at every age. Exhaustion is part of that experience because it’s exhausting being a woman of color, whether you’ve had children or not.



In my own work I’ve only just begun understanding the depths of exhaustion as I grow older, as my experiences transform into insights which drive my poems. It’s a serious sobering process but it’s also a relief to feel finally like a grown-ass person, that the suffering I’ve experienced is at least generative.


Apogee Journal: What are some examples of such love, labor, struggle, and exhaustion that you have experienced?

Wallschlaeger: I will list some: giving birth twice, writing books, accepting the responsibility of caring for those who are dependent on you, going to college, moving out to the country to start a small farm this summer from our house in Milwaukee that we own and lived in for 10 years, navigating social anxiety, being the only person of color in a family of mostly racist white people, meeting my black father and half-sister for the first time about five years ago, developing political consciousness, learning how to love and trust myself. The list goes on but these are the bigger ones.

Editorial Reviews

Wallschlaeger’s latest collection is political, personal, and timely.”— Publishers Weekly

“How can you not be grateful, in such an ugly time, for a poet who so closely and wryly and wrenchingly and furiously observes a nation?”—Chicago Tribune

“She deploys a new vocabulary for talking about the legacies of slavery and white supremacy as they manifest in daily life—a vocabulary that is as damning as it is lush, as rich with sound as it is bright with image… The domestic scenes she makes in her poems complicate clichés of who black women in America are ‘supposed’ to be.” —Hyperallergic

“The first-person perspective is harrowing and heartbreaking in its vulnerability and honesty.”— Luna Luna Magazine

“Wallschlaeger’s is a poetics of multiplication and plurality.”— Entropy

“I admire the grave persistence of her vision, the precision of her eye and ear.”—Joyelle McSweeney

From the Publisher