Andersen's Mermaid

Poetry by Letitia Chan
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Read/listen to the artist's interview here

Do not forget the netting. Whatever
you have done to me I will not
be carried away by it. To rejoice
is a ghost of the mind chemically
damning. So lip and impulse
trained as virgin to sirens. As child:
hello moon, hello moor. While the hands
for landmark carry on trailing
world I am looking at the lights
filtering in from out the city skyscrapers
adjacent face to face, as our bareness
in sheets, so I pretend your touch
belongs to nothing at all, and it is
strange, if I must be truthful, to be
so perfectly happily empty, but
for the ecstatic I carried with me
bodiless in buckets another time,
for other men, and water, that I cannot
tear from memory, is swamp
and dampened, far beneath the twenty
floors, and a little while away,
while you are going, it will be by
earth, not water.