The Marginalized Mermaid

The Marginalized

Mermaid

spends her afternoons

close to land

in the company of mud crabs

like altar boys

in the Vatican

she prays

with real fire,

she prays like she wants it

she prays that  she were something

else, some other

hybridized

sentient

creature: a centaur, perhaps, or

a Minotaur, or a half

black, half

Latino business woman

in a pencil skirt

moving up in the world.

Her father disapproves,

 he has an unbending oceanic fundamentalist view

on the stride of things;

on the swim of things,

on the hoop dash and zoom

of how things ought to be.

How things were,

were more muddy,

like the still waters where she soaked. 

Last week they said there was a death stranding

near Mexico City.

The water there was near

black with organisms.

On Fish.net a warning went out,

concerned family members only added to the stench

of the inextricable lump

of sea folk

collecting

there

en

masse.

The stench wrapped around

The equator, up to thirty

Thousand feet in the air.

Birds were sucked down,

Landing on the ever widening

sludge fields.

They found the Mermaid

Nearly three years later

In a ditch fifty feet inland.

Her scales peeled back

To reveal bright blue

Bottle caps,

A souvenir baseball cap

And seventeen cents in loose change.