Made famous by singer Billie Holiday, “I Cover the
Waterfront” is a 1933 popular jazz standard about
existence, longing, and desire. Webber’s version
reminisces about The Casino, a waterfront
night-club-turned-diner that served as an oasis for those
wandering the streets of Seattle. Webber ruminates on
notions of community, sanctuary, and survival for Black
and Indigenous racial outsiders, artists, and gender
non-conformists. For her multiracial and two-spirit
family, The Casino was both a source of sustenance and a
sanctuary where they could fully assert who they were
without fear of arrest or violence. While a narrative, the
poem does not tell a linear story. It skips through time
like a stone on the surface of water. Sensuous and
visceral, it offers vignettes that weave in and out of
time and place, their loose ends lingering, refusing easy
answers, “because there is no answer, really, just
variations on a theme as always.”
