Word count: 152
Paragraphs: 21
21ST CENTURY HAIKU
& the nature of
their electric chairs is they
stay Electric Chairs...
POLAR VORTEX
bone cracking
cold rock
candy
cracking bone
rock cold
hold
he got candy
red rock redrum
Grit my bones
cracking up
broke cavemen
avalanche
government
more currency
more candy
more rockslide
resist against
rock cold
against cracking
that’s some
cold bone
rocking candy
big beat
in my bones
redrum
blackslide the
government
break up
the big grit
crack me up
there there
there there
red girl here
have some
nice candy
chill tf out
can’t change
the weather
can’t beat
what’s broken
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. Her third collection, Waterbaby, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in 2021.