Lizzy Burnam 🐞

1. 
Our first try was truly grotesque.
More anglerfish than angel, 
she thrashed like a storm when we tried to hold her,
latched on with a venomous bite 
and would not let go. 

But we could see in her pearl-blue eyes 
that we were onto something:
a light in the darkness, luminary 
of the questions man has yet to answer. 

2.
The second was a dud. Neither air nor water 
would please her. She gagged 
on both, drowning on the sand dunes
and suffocating in the sea. 
Stubborn bitch, what do you want?
We would've torn open the sky to tame her. 

But her voice was garbled, thunderous,  
and we couldn't learn her language 
in time to fix it. She did not survive long. 

3.
Promising—fit neatly in the bathtub, 
trembled under the hot rush of tap water, 
with gorgeous prismatic scales 
that glittered like a thousand stars. 
This one was insatiably cruel, though,
called our best scientists swine
and slashed at our throats 
when we got close enough to touch. 

We cut her open to figure out what went wrong, 
and her tiny heart glowed like a will-o-the-wisp. 

4.
Fish head, fish torso, with sturdy human legs 
to carry the wet half around. 
She spoke plain english but couldn't sing. 

Not sexy enough—there was no market for it. 

5.
The siren-type of fantasy, 
human in all the right places
with a voice like a cool ocean breeze. 
Her eyes rippled like the surface of a lake
and we saw only what we wanted to see:
beauty, power, immortality.
We called her Selene, our sweet reflection. 

One by one, she led us to the water
and quenched the last of our curiosities.