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The Quintessential Mermaid's Emergence
Spat from the womb—salt-laden,
swelling, slick with the memory of before.
The ocean convulses, king tide ascending,
moon swollen with the gravitational ache of arrival.
Foam-limbs thrash, unclaimed by land,
skin webbed in the viscera of birthwater,
gills gasping against air’s unholy insistence,
lungs unwilling, unready, unsure.
Fingertips trace the rim of existence,
a baptism of kelp and brine,
the belly of the deep churning, a guttural hymn unsung.
The quintessential mermaid, neither here nor gone,
between the tugging hands of earth and abyss,
caught in the lunar pull of something larger,
something unfathomable—something not yet named.
She drags herself from the belly of tide,
still slick, still swelling,
the ocean never releases its own.
