Sirens are just mermaids with knives

The sea is full of promises, aquatic foxes, a platform for starfish to feed, the seabed is warm, tinged blue from lack of light but we are bright with our lamps and bulbs, mother pinched us like a lobster might try to hold the hand of an all-consuming rope net, she said we were tidal waves, she said we were boring, she told us stories about how love lives in the groundwater and we believed her, so we're out with our silence and our feelings, you know how it is, the frazil ice isn't a bother, sorry about the iris rumor and how we snuffed out the crown, do you know what we are, do you know how to flee, do you see the skeletons of sailors all moldy and green by the base of the tree, nature is a basin of worship, we string words together like we string paste candies on a dancer's necklace, things are unstable but at least we know how to write.How many fish did mother want, we wonder, we wander beneath an uneven sky, everything is silt and soft, left a salt apple with all its teeth, left you even though we shouldn't have, but what would life have been like if we'd stayed? Sure, there'd be cable knit sweaters and an amber kitchen, you would have known what to do when the whale beached itself on the shore, you wore wire rims and had a fake gold tooth, your name rhymes with words like potato and tectonic plate, you tried to keep hurricanes in jars but everything fell apart until your house was covered in glass shards, what a mistake to tell us about the electricity and the fast ice, but we digress, you're gone and we're busy with the sea.Everything sings down here and the dolphins have a swearing problem, mother wouldn't approve, she waits up for us at the mouth of Ocean House, prays we'll become fossils she can hang above the fireplace, she fights with her sister and wears high heels in the sandbars, well whatever, what do we know of helmets and eggs and fins, but jesus christ was your anger a problem and you said you didn't care about the house of violence, tried to make us give up fishing and food, we even broke up with shrimp, there are no lovers at the bottom of the trench but it is quite nice to trade stories with frilled sharks.It's like we told you, we're not done until we've overturned every sand dollar and revealed all we have to offer, flip flip, here another secret, another secret, another secret, a patch of blood, it's not our responsibility to make you feel it, flip then jaws, claw, tentacle wing, sorry-sorry stamped in the coral barnacles and we'll never be in love again but it doesn't matter, the degree to which we'll swim to preserve ourselves is extreme and there lurk the hearts, all ruby and bioluminescent in the pitch cold dark, it's too late for dreams of tomatoes and aster, what happens with the knife stays on the knife, one by one we pull apart with our teeth the unstable atrium, the deceptive aorta, the right to have a ventricle, here comes the knife, the daughters, the light.