WE ARE MERMAIDS (3)

By: Stephanie Burt
October 13, 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.

HYMN TO YOUTH

after Jaime Gil de Biedma

Where did you go — no, where are you
      going,
where do you want to go, years
that made up my youth, however you
      count yourself now?
Who will take you back to the beach?
Remember how calm the grownups
      remained, palms
open, grasping their pencils and pens and
      their purses
lightly in their left hands, when they should
      have known
we would hurt ourselves. We hurt
      ourselves.
We rumbled through our own imaginations
as in the middens of clothes at Dollar-a-
      Pound,
trying on gowns, capes, suits that never fit.

You were the waves. We could live among
      the waves,
arising and lapping and falling back, salty
      and pure
like the salt inside us. Our little breasts,
our half-curves, our ambitious, ambiguous
      bodies.
You in particular were all insinuations,
muscular hints I was never meant to take.
Afternoon sun made a temporary
mirror out of the last, lenticular sand.
Our footprints left stiff slots for future
      tears,
the kind the sea brings everyone.

We were becoming. We brought you. You
      kept us there
in search of crests and troughs, anywhere
      we could leap
and dive and overwhelm our bodies,
looking for conch shells, clam shards, far
      fins, dolphins,
ways to call out to those other youth
      undersea,
who blew their triton notes and called to
      us.
They were the capacious luxury
of this life, imagined as another life,
more intense, more free. (Look: I’ve
      changed my style
from a one-piece to a two-piece, with
      scalloped
briefs and fluffy ruffles. Want to see?)
You didn’t want us so much as we wanted
you, sophisticated starlet
with the manners of a yawning lanternfish
or the timidity of a just-crowned prince.
When we lost one friend we knew
we would never find another. We never did.

Salt hurt the bottoms of our feet.

They said we would be kings
if only we learned to hold hands…

You were never one thing, my youth.
You were a terror, a missed chance, a
      come-again,
a kind of eternal return. When you come to
      my door,
today, far from the sea, I let you in.
Sometimes you are Daphne, tormented
by that insistent, obtuse pursuer, the sun,
and sometimes you strike a pose,
indifferent, like Antinoüs,
to what I want, to what anyone wants,
content to be seen after hiding, among the
      men
and women, the training bras and the just-
      in-case shorts,
the outgrown rain slickers and broken-in
      running shoes,
the closets full of night and nonbinary
      angels,
the selkies, the griffins, the Fair Folk who
      taught you to fly…

Come in. Sit down. I don’t have a crown or
      a throne.
I do have an armchair, a plush one I found
      on the street
in August when the students were moving
      out.
There are things I want you to see,
now that I’m beautiful,
as you wanted to be.

***

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 (3)

Categories

Tags