Vagrant Mermaid in a Drained Swimming Pool
one tries hard not to become a ghost
even if it means a drastic wardrobe
update and humbling yourself in a
pentecostal seed-studded cloudburst.
so many trees we never named and
what if next time was the first time?
maybe the stars wouldn’t have to
burn so hard just to compete with
shiny novelty gift baskets, but the
algorithm decrees that a million-
year-old fire just isn’t newsworthy.
some days we don’t even look up,
not even once, accidentally, when
the light won’t change, the meme
won’t load, and the true song is
stillborn, smothered under static.
in the old sublet ifrah talked of her
jade plant, how it could regrow its
arms to infinity. the pit she dug
when she went away is big but
maybe not infinite. we’ll see. that
whole year my hands were empty.
my world balloon said one thing;
my thought balloon, something else.
About the artist
Darrell Epp‘s poetry collection Alien Phonics Primer was published in 2024.
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Image from the Brooklyn Museum: from Seaweeds by Eliza A. Jordson (1848)
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