The mermaid whispered fish words, bubbles of narrative
schooling past as I refused to drown, alive in my silence.
She stood arms akimbo, dark hair floating like eels,
as she sang me awake. But all I heard were echoes
of the ocean, a crying of small fry and destroyed coral, the clatter
of crabs clawing their lost way across pebbles, the bright blue kind
from my long-ago fish tank. Seaweed strands wrapped around
my fingers, eyes. I couldn’t wake up even as she whooshed past,
an iridescent shimmer of wavering light, she of two worlds,
up and down, dry and wet, awake and asleep, she a woman who could sing
underwater, she who craved my ear to open like a clam.
The water grew cold, my body shaking as the mermaid finned away,
taking with her light, and hope, and any chance I would understand
once I broke the surface of my dream, the messages
buried deep in the bodies of bivalves, waiting for my next life.