Do you know what a Fiji mermaid is?
Do your Googles work on your phone?
[LAUGHTER]
It's F-I-J-I mermaid.
Or you can look up F-E-E-J-E-E mermaid.
And this is how we read poems together in 2024.
You got to meet me halfway with these ones.
But this poem that appears in the book
has a Fiji mermaid in it.
And if you're looking at it now, it's
like this patchwork stitched together
beast, this horrible turducken-like thing.
[LAUGHTER]
And it's also like a hoax.
It's a fake.
It's a sideshow thing, which seems right.
And there's one of those in this poem.
And there's also an epigraph that's kind of long.
So I'll just kind of describe what it does.
But there's a book called Spanish Colonial Tucson:
a Demographic History that names an ancestor of mine
pretty uncharitably.
And I love it because there's a complaint from a Spanish priest
that my ancestor was kind of inept.
And what really makes me--
what I get a kick out of is that even in the late 18th-century,
there's this sentiment that we're just tired of nepo babies
and their ineptitude.
And i think of a quote from it was
that, this guy does nothing but dance, gamble,
and sport fancy clothes.
So this is called In The Style Of Early Television Makeup.
To what extent is one ancestor you:
ebb exposed and uniformless skull,
skull who evidently once sat for a portrait on a donkey
painted wraithlike in the style of early television makeup
on the very crushed water bottle island
vortices you trawl tonight?
Hat with the extravagant galloon,
bloodblack Sea of Cortez.
All Souls' didn't Mother comb for bone slivers
with your toothbrush, splice wreckage--
uncorrupted digit, true cross, the figurehead doll's
hard recurring white syphilitic eye--
hoist that Fiji mermaid in your church clothes?
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]