Ariel, belle of the sea, drunk on a bar stool next to me. She grieves,
says she feels suckered, did not sprout the legs

she was promised. Her siren-red thatch clings head to shoulders
as she sobs, I am neither a woman, nor a fish. The gin, murky, her third,

gestures in her lily-knuckled grip. I think, What a dreamer. Who could help
but adore such a creature? I once read that the Danish novelist who imagined her

was celibate. When he died, his recovered journal said, MY BLOOD WANTS
LOVE. I pity big-eyed Ariel, now draped over the marble belly

of the bar; she is the candied contortion of his original lust. She looks up,
her tear-drops look too severe. They cut tracks, and when one starts

from her mouth I know it is blood. Stunned, I follow their ooze to a pool on the blue
rubber floor, 'round a pile of her salty insides. How had I not noticed her

missing lower half? All this time, a torso propped on the stool, snug
in its seashell brassiere. With each weeping heave, she has pumped from the place

where her waist was severed: a sludge of lungs, stomach, and parts
of her heart. The gin, too, must be mixed in. I recall

Hans Christian's full entry: MY BLOOD WANTS LOVE
AS MY HEART DOES. Like little Karen in his later fairytale, whose possessed

red shoes force her to dance forever, Ariel was misled.
She misread. Signed for a human soul, not legs.