Find and share the perfect poems.
The photographer has been treating her like a spork all morning. “Wistful mouth, excited tail! Work it, work it!” He has no idea that even fake smiling spreads to her eyes and her tail and there’s nothing she can do about it short of severing her spine. Without asking, the assistant re-sprays her with glycerine. It’s gonna be hell getting all that grease off her scales tonight but she can’t scum up her tank at the bar—its weekly cleanings seem more like monthly these days, and fewer and fewer patrons have been inviting (read: paying) her for a Tankside Mertini and quick feel of her tail. There’s one regular who lapses in and out of consciousness and he’s the real reason she stays. Every once in a while he seems to have forgotten where he is and he looks at her with the kind of wonder she imagines her grandmother inspired when she first risked coming ashore. After an hour under the studio spotlights, she’s starting to smell pretty fishy. Can’t blame it (as she has before) on her standard seaweed bra because this fool of a photographer has her holding two clear fishbowls in front of her breasts so it looks like goldfish are swimming past her nipples. She’s supposed to pretend it tickles. She wants to ask if he’s heard the phrase "gilding the lily" which she recently learned at Land Berlitz. When asked if she’s tired, she lies. A downward spiral means the opposite up here.
| About this poem: "This is the last in a series of nine mermaid prose poems I've written. Because of the first poem, I was invited to Mercon 2011, the first international mermaid gathering, held in Las Vegas. 'The Objectified Mermaid' was inspired by the constant photographing of the girls and women in glittery tails (I was photographing them too). Mermen were few—one Neptune and just a handful of others." Matthea Harvey |
For the time being call me Home. All the ingénues do. Units are the engines I understand best. One betrayal, two. Merrily, merrily, merrily. Define hope. Machine. Define machine. Nope. Like thoughts, the geniuses race through. If you're lucky after a number of revolutions, you'll feel something catch.
Rain fell in a post-romantic way.
Heads in the planets, toes tucked
under carpets, that’s how we got our bodies
through. The translator made the sign
for twenty horses backing away from
a lump of sugar. Yes, you.
When I said did you want me
I meant me in the general sense.
The drink we drank was cordial.
In a spoon, the ceiling fan whirled.
The Old World smoked in the fireplace.
Glum was the woman in the ostrich feather hat.
The Backyard Mermaid slumps across the birdbath, tired of fighting birds for seeds and lard. She hates those fluffed-up feathery fish imitations, but her hatred of the cat goes fathoms deeper. That beast is always twining about her tail, looking to take a little nip of what it considers a giant fish. Its breath smells of possible friends. She collects every baseball or tennis ball that flies into her domain to throw at the creature, but it advances undeterred, even purring. To add further insult to injury it has a proper name, Furball, stamped on a silver tag on its collar. She didn't even know she had a name until one day she heard the human explaining to another one, "Oh that's just the backyard mermaid." Backyard Mermaid she murmured, as if in prayer. On days when there's no sprinkler to comb through her curls, no rain pouring in glorious torrents from the gutters, no dew in the grass for her to nuzzle with her nose, not even a mud puddle in the kiddie pool, she wonders how much longer she can bear this life. The front yard thud of the newspaper every morning. Singing songs to the unresponsive push mower in the garage. Wriggling under fence after fence to reach the house four down which has an aquarium in the back window. She wants to get lost in that sad glowing square of blue. Don't you?
Your object will have made a good subject and I should get to tell you so: the bird with a beak but no mouth, we hear him only when it's night in the Dominican Republic and Israel at the same time. Someone will find your marginalia useful, so try to spare some ink. I took dictation only from you, for whom verbs were nothing and tense everything. See the difference, you kept asking, but it wasn't a question. See how enormous— camel hauling an empty wheelchair, conspiracy of hangman men, dried-out song that makes it snow. You realize we could have walked home in the hours taking inventory took, jack of no traits. Bird with no wings.