Oni Buchanan
PROSTHETIC MERMAID TAILS
- Prosthetic mermaid tails | for humans are now
- in the queue of consideration | to be declared illegal.
- In some more forwardlooking | countries with more
- evolved, efficient | judicial systems, indeed
- mermaid tails have already | been declared illegal.
- Because the problem is that | when wearing a mermaid tail,
- it turns out that humans | become fooled by the temporary
- physicality, by the merging | of the legs into a fin—even a
- prosthetic fin!—to think | that they could stay underwater
- longer than is actually | humanly possible. Given human
- limitations of breathing. | See, the reality
- is that people were drowning. | Real people were actually drowning!
- Human men and women | who wore mermaid tails
- found their brains in such a | state of ecstasy—flipping
- underwater, gliding, speeding, | diving deep—and they stayed
- too long, they engaged the | illusion 2035 seconds too long
- was really all it took. | (Approximately.) Just the
- slightest misdemeanor. | Just the slightest selfindulgence.
- Just the sheer wonder, luxuriating | at the joy they felt, at the sudden
- intoxicating quantity of | bliss and freedom! At the
- possibilities opening up, | unfolding before them almost
- infinitely after so much | deprivation! After so much
- gravity and groundedness! | And honestly, it blotted out
- their better judgment. | And they drowned
- from lingering too long | in their fleeting fantasy, their
- selfdelusion which had | meanwhile brought them deep
- into an uninhabitable | ecosystem. You can see
- how this phenomenon | is problematic. Because
- to put it bluntly, human | possibility ends before
- mermaid possibility, when it | comes to swimming underwater.
- It’s just a pure and simple | fact. Everyone knows that
- rationally. And from isolated | tragedy, as sometimes happens,
- a larger pattern began | to form when tracked upon a
- map, when tracked in analyzed | causality: drownings of euphoria,
- drownings of delirious | diving, drownings with the widest
- smiles and the cheeks stretched | underwater with the speed,
- then suddenly the limits | of the breath’s elasticity are
- reached, the surface frames | a tantalizing gateway,
- the sun shines high | above the shimmering boundary—
ONI BUCHANAN is a poet, pianist, and the founder and director of the Ariel Artists classical music management company. Buchanan is the author of three books of poetry: Must a Violence, Spring, and What Animal. Her poems have been selected for numerous anthologies, and have been published in many print and online literary journals.
