Mississippi Mermaid

There you are stammering stories, sipping Tom Collins, when you tell me your favorites begin with “The last time I went crazy…” And I’m flashing my driver’s license to every bartender on U-Street because they’ve never seen one from Mississippi and ask me if we have dirt roads or If I wear shoes or how I ended up there because no boats from Asia beach in the Gulf. And I know you were born into a family of trees but your father also counted fish with sound waves for the NRL and he was a sailor, like all men are sailors, so you think that you were really a mermaid swimming in the Mississippi Sound and only drowning men can see you—and I see you. You tell me you have some connection to the moon like the rhythms of the tide, like wolves, like whales, that you culled pink pearls out of oysters in Charleston, that your blood is half brine and that we were all born out of water first anyway: then you show me where to look between the ripples in the Potomac. On the metro, I fall over, but you’d rather trace words like chanterelle or Occidental with your tongue touching your teeth. You get off at Georgetown but I linger. The metro closes at ten, I don’t know that, so I flag a cab to Georgetown where your rent is so high you live in a room divided and curtained off by an American flag.