Poem of the Month: August

Ella Schmidt, Contributor

All There is to Say About Mermaids

The fact is your eyes make no impression
but that they are blue, blue-eyed muse
of everything.
Blue roadside rain to windowless Atlanta fever,
stained beatitude blue of rafters.
Somewhere blue sleep
by the washing machine.
Spin-cycle siren song,
water drips slow in the kitchen sink.
Blue of college sweatshirts, somewhere
you are the blue curled lip of tide, boundless gills
and expired horoscopes that people the fridge.
Fabric for reddened accolades of loving you so,
you are blue of elegies, of the freezer aisle at night.
Blue ballad stuff, cares in the body of a thimble.
The fact is you are the moon
before you are a symbol,
wary of sidewalk movers and all else yellow light.
Overworked as a mermaid or a rose,
no longer living but emblemized.
Blue-bodied muse of too much.
The fact is you knew before all the stoner-boys with guitars
that our grandfathers on veteran’s day spoke old whiskey sonnets,
that some girls can only be described like first cars,
the way they can’t brush their hair without inspiring
the next hundred silk-similes
and all the bluest love songs from across the room.
That the moon tonight is doomed
to outdo its old blues,
and the poets will go on about it for decades.