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...a mermaid from Louisiana.
I'm channeling my grandmother hard She may or may not have been a mermaid
she definitely was from Louisiana.
She goes by Lurlene because that’s easier
to wrap your tongue around than her real name.
The same is true of most drag queens, but under the sequins, the shine and the cigarettes,
Lurlene is more Mami Wata than most. It’s confusing
to watch her dance in the clubs down Decatur. She blurs like a mist somehow,
moves like the Cancer Alley current. We don’t drink the water.
Everybody’s gota lost love, a story, a hang-up, and a prescription,
but Lurlene captivates when she tells it like it is, one smoky chuckle at a time.
So we pull up that chair, we buy her that cocktail
and we watch her drink it, breathing secondhand blue air
like it was water from home.
Swamp girls either never leave
or get out as fast as they can. The same is true of girls from the delta,
the hills, the backwoods, the Lower Nine. But it’s not so easy to hit the road
when you were born instead to walk on water and breathe it too.
Give any ‘gator a marshmallow and he’s sweet as milk
for long enough to let you pass. This is the least of my secrets.
(Believe it or not, you can learn a lot from muskrat girls,
the closest things to our selkie sisters anyone in these parts is ever gonna see
three drinks in, down le bayou.) The year wheel turns
on Mardi Gras down here. It’s frozen that way now, in a demon’s
rictus grin the way your mama told you
your face would freeze. Something’s gotta balance out
the rest of the parish, its holiness and heat.
My cool copper skin never dries and I can drink any bartender
this side of Pontchartrain under the table. Ladies prefer wormwood.
I won’t lie: I have an appetite for ‘bling.
With beads in the trees all year ’round in the Crescent City,
who could blame us for wanting a little of our own flash and
shimmer down below
where the mud and the sewage swirl so thick we never even try to get the smell out?
I have been known to sneak a marshmallow to the big white ‘gator at the aquarium.
It’s either that, or set him free, and I don’t trust myself to be good.
Too many children runnin’ around in there, so it’s the smaller rebellion for us, for
now. Mardi Gras makes it easier
to walk the streets naked as we please
fins and finery unhidden. People celebrate beauty then,
worship the macabre, but don’t try that ***
in Shreveport, Monroe, Bastrop. They’ll send you packing at best.
My mother remembers Bonnie and Clyde, all the fear they commanded in Louisiana
before my time. Mermaids are no less living legends,
but we don’t tote guns unless we’re walking the Bywater
at three in the morning. Sometimes I do just that,
circus freak, swamp girl walking tall,
and some poor boy’s fascination with my flesh
turns to fear and so to food.
It’ll do. On an easy night, I’ll go into town
arm in arm with my sisters to practice the few steps we’ve learned
since so few folks are fool enough to go swimming,
but most are plenty fool enough to go out dancing.
It’s just as hard to see the bottom of the night, sugar
as it is to see the bottom of the river.