The Origin of Mermaids
Let’s travel back in time and
play that telephone game where
the message morphs
and scrambles, I love you
You loathe me? I love you
You’re lost? I don’t care
what you ate for dinner
if your baby sleeps
through the night knows
how to crawl has learned
to cry mama. Tell me:
what would you do if given
to desire? Who would you
kill if you had a one free shot?
Fine. Okay. We’ll talk about the weather
how the wind blows too cold
for spring and your husband’s body
burns you up
all wrong. He won’t leave
but you are free to walk
into the ocean taste
the sea on your tongue
sand of your bones
feel the pull of the moon
The womb? Either way, be
subsumed remade of sea
foam and kelp mythic
and mystic sun shimmering
your skin like a memory
I don’t care how years
pass like clouds since we last played
the actual telephone game
the one where I hear your voice
call for me and I’m on your shore
dry towel cold drink sun
bleeding into the dark
bruise of the horizon
kiss me. Kill me. Either way
waves cradle us in lullabies.
Claire Taylor
Claire Taylor is the author of multiple chapbooks, including Mother Nature and One Good Thing. She is the founding editor of Little Thoughts Press, and serves as the prose chapbook editor for Yellow Arrow Publishing. Claire lives with her family in Baltimore, Maryland, in an old stone house where birds love to roost. You can find her online at clairemtaylor.com.
Why This Knocked Taylor Out:
I think I could talk about every aspect of this poem at length to explain why I like it. The sounds, the images, the circling back, the genius of the telephone game lines. All of it. I am enamored. Reading it outloud to Martheaus was like an out of body experience for a bit.
Okay so let's start with the sounds, do me a favor and go track the “L” sounds through the poem. When do they fall away? How do they change the pacing of the poem throughout? When I read a lot of “L” sounds, there’s a sense of lulling that happens which I think this poem wants, as you can also tell by the ending. But there are also times the poem becomes disinterested in lulling and wants you on your toes. This happens for me when the “L” sounds fall away in particular like at “Either way, be/subsumed remade of sea/foam and kelp mythic/and mystic sun shimmering/your skin like a memory” (which also when you think about it, also gets at the emotional heart of the poem. Memory and being consumed by the womb, a husband, etc).
And of course the images and how the poem is able to complete itself. We start with the telephone game and some fun plays on words and how meaning can be translated overtime. The rest of the poem is a journey to come back to another play on words. The journey really, not to be tacky, in this poem does feel like a movement through life. From childhood, to a marriage the speaker doesn’t seem trapped in per se, but doesn’t feel fulfilled in. Or at the very least, the speaker seems to be longing for a time they can no longer access. One where they aren’t worried about babies sleeping through the night or a husband who won’t leave.
Anyways, this is getting long but please take your time with this one. It’s a banger!
Interview:
Why team Taylor?
My primary reason for choosing team Taylor was that my submission included a dinosaur poem. That poem ended up getting picked up for publication by DMQ Review, but given both the dino connection and the Taylor-Taylor coincidence, I figured I would trust that there was a touch of destiny at play and go for Taylor.
Where did the concept of the telephone game come from and how did it develop alongside the other images in this poem?
I had the line "feel the pull of the moon / The womb? Either way, be / subsumed" first, long before anything else. It spoke to me of women, the moon and the womb both connecting to cycles, to birth, and sounded like a snippet of a conversation, one person mishearing another, which reminded me of the telephone game I used to play at sleepover parties when I was a kid.
This poem, at its heart, is a love poem to female friendships, the kind that are so intimate and closely connected that they almost blur the line between friend and partner. I wanted to play with that blurring a bit by infusing the poem with a sense of unspoken emotions and verboten topics, but really it’s more about the twisty nature of these intimate friendships over time, how you can go through periods where you’re not really connecting—your lives, your children, your partners take over—but then come back to each other as if no time has passed. The telephone game serves to represent the longevity of these connections—it’s a childhood game, one that in addition to being silly is also sort of tantalizing because of its closeness, how you’re right up next to another person, whispering in their ear—but also that sense of having drifted apart in a way that makes it a little harder to be as open and honest, where you lose a little of that ability to really hear what someone is trying to tell you when they are too afraid to speak it outright.
Poems addressing the second person "you" have a way of bringing the reader in tight to the content, what about this poem demands that closeness from the reader and why did you choose that?
I think because my initial entry into the poem was with the lines I mentioned in the previous question that sounded conversational to my ear, I wanted the poem to be speaking directly to someone instead of about someone. There are a lot of layered emotions in this piece: nostalgia and longing, frustration and a bit of anger, love and tenderness. Directing those emotions at someone, even if it’s an unnamed, unspecified “you” gives them more heft and creates a greater sense of intimacy and shared connection that I wanted to capture in this poem.