Canto Perilous

Cozy and flexed, my kitchen window
stretches a new found view, it affects
the whole house, makes snow or heaves
a humid afternoon. In the floorboards
a little water from the storm, a little
ocean with sea women, sea teeth, mermaids,

ambience of drowning, particular mermaids
disperse a toad’s evolution at a cashier’s window,
movies piecing together a glance at your little
leg, the tree you are staked to; which effects
ambulation’s variables, gains strength and boards
the little organ in its house until it heaves

out a burn victim from its vacuum’s heaving
breast, rescued at sea by the fleshy slip of a mermaid’s
tongue, the pulling hands, to the squalid boards
of her double wide, mold stains above the window,
its forest floor, the brown condemned effect
of the carpet, unhurried corkscrew, to her little

shivering fingers paused over little
buttons, to the shower of fuel, who heaves
rainbows of fuel in swampy obscurity, affecting
sallow mug shots in bashful pride like a mermaid
caught with her pants down in the window,
two the jagged sticks on her resurrecting boards,

wounds where dog’s put their ribs through boards,
out of restraint the scalpel sees its ancestry in little
hanging plastic casements. Scatter my windows
with the cold ladle, telegram the scalpel heaves
into ashes on a salad dressed in creamed mermaid
the cost of a family reunion. I am cold, my affects

wash up on the beach, undulating defects
rumpled in tide, spend a little time in boards
dress in my habits, the confiscated mermaids
wearing what the common folk worry little
about. You know we eat our children, heave
them like invasive species through the window.

See how the mermaids dress heaves with opinions?
Her little tide like breast holds back the boards,
gives the affect of falling into water