WE ARE MERMAIDS (1)

By: Stephanie Burt
October 6, 2022

We are pleased to excerpt four poems from HILOBROW friend Stephanie Burt’s new collection, We Are Mermaids (published this month by Graywolf Press). Lavendar Arseny has illustrated each poem in our series with an original photograph.

MIAMI

Not the sense of standing alone
in front of a microphone,
but the adjustments of playing along
with a more experienced band.

Not the fear of representing
an establishment, but of representing it
badly,
of being inundated and then shipped
home.

The scallops whose breathing
tubes pop up
above the receding salt water,
through the overlaps of sand.

The fear you’ll sink like a skipped stone.

The past, as it grows
away from you, is thickening.

The young reader in the too-often-washed
Avengers T-shirt with the collar cut out had
asked,
“How do you deal with the fear of existing?”

The insubstantial feeling
that came to you then, the vertigo,
and the quickening.

***

WE ARE MERMAIDS: “Miami” | “Boeing 757s, Airbus 320s, an Embraer 190” | “Hymn to Youth” | “Love Poem with Comic Books on Saturdays”.

Lavendar Arseny is a creative photographer. They are autistic and nonbinary, and they collect stuffed animals. Find them here.

WE ARE MERMAIDS (1)

Categories

Tags