meet a mermaid. We commiserate,
half-rodent to half-fish, as she hugs the shoreline
and I hover at the topsoil, border between
above ground and below. She says the rebellion
has come, describes the scene for the benefit
of my scooped-out darkness. The mole people
walk upright, she says, a spreading pestilence
that overturns crops and claims the upper kingdoms
as their own. The merfolk flop up on beaches,
undulate on unseen waves, raise tridents for war.
They won’t accept another treaty:
You may walk among us if you walk on swords,
if your feet bleed, and you dissolve to foam
when we tire of watching you dance.
I twitch my nose to and fro. I smell nothing.
Can’t an old mermatron dream? she laughs.
She strokes my downy back. She concedes,
no, we are staying in our place, as ever always.
Stagehands
I.
He’ll be a real Canadian yet.
In this toddler’s garden of innocuous nouns
emotions are drawn in just mouths and eyes.
Tense confusion
makes him seem innocent.
Unable to tell the difference
between What did you do last winter?
and What do you do in winter?
he does not reply,
I buried my wife.
He smiles,
thinking it is a general question,
a test of cultural knowledge.
And he knows this one.
What does one do in winter
here, where winter is a thing.
One skis, skates, snowshoes.
II.
At night, he rips off his Velcro eyebrows,
undoes the straps of his silicone belly,
and hangs it on the wall. The body hair
rubs off with a hard sponge. He gargles,
spits, and his accent—too thick
not to question its veracity, really—
sticks like phlegm to the edge of the drain.
Russia is not a real country. Then
he goes to the Club
for Beautiful Men.
Stagehands add one more layer
of orange cooking grease to the wall
behind the stove, take a fine chisel
to the filaments of the aquamarine
1970s fridge. The illusion
of slow appliance death.
They paint mustard stains
on his white undershirt, then rub them in
deeper, as though someone once
tried to wash them out.
Afterhours
We sit in the Joker’s dressing room, taking hits off a canister of Joker Venom. He says, “The best love stories are unconsummated. That’s why Romeo and Juliet sucked.” He giggles, today somewhere between Mark Hamill and Tigger from Winnie the Pooh: “Hoo hoo hoo!” The PA lies dead in the corner: scooped-out sickle face, upper gums and all his teeth on display, eyes rolled back in a forever paroxysm of glee. We’ve built up an immunity. We will never be that happy.
Joker’s many tongues writhe living on a rack. One long and pointed, devil-dagger. One too wide for his mouth, making him slurp and lisp. Many tongues of ordinary men, where he lurks most often.
Streetlamp shadows gone to morning. I am short again and eighty years old. “You don’t look a day over thirty-five,” he coos. Death as consummation. “I can kill everyone you love,” he says. “They’re all so boring. I can do this—” He lifts my mask to kiss me on the nose. This mask shows only my exquisite jawline. He bites, gently, rests the guillotine pressure of his teeth. I glance at the vanity mirror as he pulls away, expecting a lipstick mark that isn’t there. Sweat cuts a canyon down his temple. This Joker wears white powder, but his lips are permanently candy apple red. By accident, nature or design.
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