A Lost Position

by Nikki Wallschlaeger

People get lost as they can be
long as they are willing to go,
and then they ask to
go further.

Give me a leader, they say,
we want to go farther
than before,

so a new leader is created
out of their ignorance
from the deepest blood cut.

New leader gets in position,
together they sign a covenant.

It is long and nobody reads it,
but it says what they want to hear.

It says, “Staying lost
is the greatest asset
anyone could hope for.”

Nikki Wallschlaeger’s work has been featured in The Nation, Brick, American Poetry Review, Witness, 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), also from Bloof Books.

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