Afraid of being unfashionable, as always, I ask the mermaid if I may use sweetness to disguise the poem found between her legs. It’s sad that she must realise this is an attempt at delaying the inevitable arrival of a crude joke about seam ripping.
Because it’s still there, below, a hooded eye looking up between the slats. It’s Vito enjoying himself a moist broadcast.
She announces her arrival to his gallery with a dollop of her tail, followed by the scratch of petrol rainbow over a heart. Not the beating heart, it’s not the old man’s foretelling. Just the groove she feels like her own scales, like the glitter she counts where others would weigh themselves, because it is only ever on wood and above water that she faces accusations of weight.
She does not know yet of a once-plump Peggy; a two-legged copywriter with a cigarette dangling from her mouth and an octopus pleasuring a woman tucked under her arm. Somewhere in there is a ship of Theseus story troubled by a wooden mermaid long used to decorate our hulls. She’s removed from the ship and stored in archive dust, and there she tells her son, the salty sconce, in her own wooden way, tales of his father, of his beautiful orange tentacles.
There is a statue also, made boring by birth of bronze and its innate resistance to wet-rot. A statue above the waves is always unsettling; to be placed before the world was flooded. To shout your defiance, but only ever like a small Danish girl, demurely sitting on the harbour rocks. Secured in place, she is unable to slip into the twenty-four-hour diner where the servers never complain about saltwater on the vinyl seats. It is there that Peggy orchestrates a mermaid meet.
The mermaid never suffers hiccups, lips cleverly gup-gupping to drink from the other side of the cup. At spilt coffee, she dreams of a namesake in original and complete glory; Seattle signage with split tail outstretched, tips held in crooks, bare chest obscured by tendril locks.
A mermaid knows two stories. She cannot tell either to Peggy, who is busy ashing her cigarette into an empty shrimp cocktail glass, because the mermaid sold her voice for a seam ripper. She wanted a silver to hook between the silt.
One: the white clouds of seafoam are the result of a cousin crying at a lost human love.
Two: the white clouds of seafoam are the spend of Poseidon’s seed.
Either way, a mermaid’s purse quivers in anticipation and delight.
To find land, she slid between fishnet tights. She let her Vaseline body be hoisted into the sky, closed lips when sailors sighed at the oil slick crease of her thigh. This is how she found the gallery where Vito hides under ramp, touching himself to thoughts of visitors, and
blades
and tongue meat,
and meat of tongue,
and other stolen puns,
because the mermaid does not know,
for Vito to be happy,
she cannot know.
The joke is lost and found in stitched legs. She is as light as the house her ship built. She is where Jack lost his axe. She’s a wet fish-siren, an open-mouth-door-mouse, a musical robot found slapping on the wall of a board and batten tavern.
It’s a lisping wave crash mechanic; the allure of absent gargled sound; a mermaid tail dripping on the fantasies of an artist un-found. Under disguise, like sugar to salt to sand; she is breathing. She is
un-drowned.
