it is easy to get confused
in these spaces between:
in the Yaeyama Islands where land meets sea
the beaches are littered with dead stars—
not the five-point regenerator
of arms, but single-celled organisms
for whom taxonomy is a mess
(all taxonomy is a mess)
the sands all exoskeletons,
beaches built of broken bones
shaped like stars, their shells
called tests (it is all tests)
it is easy to get confused
in these spaces between:
shores are nothing but blurred
edges, wondering where one thing
stops and another burns, like salt
in a wound—so little proof of any pain
within, heavier on the burden
because feelings don’t count for much
besides invisible nuisance, evidence
of hysteria; the body should withstand
the crashing of sea; the body looks like
it should withstand the crashing
of the sea, where absence meets
space, and yet the body wilts under
so little pressure, as though
there is something more,
tides moved by invisible forces
it is easy to get confused
in these spaces between:
a child reaching for the eye-catching—
she swears it sea glass, translucent and beached,
but a mother scolds her ignorance
of what is obviously a jellyfish; so many
times, what looks soft and glittering can scar
it is easy to get confused
in these spaces between:
what the body wants cannot separate from
what the mind wants cannot separate from
what the spirit wants cannot separate from
the approval of man plus woman equals child
the approval of woman equals femme
the approval of shrinking all desires
that deviate, but still the body wants
the mind wants the spirit wants
and it is more than the approved, all along
a spectrum, tides rising and falling against
a shore, the broken bones of expectations—
rhyme, but no reason, desire
beyond boxes so prettily wrapped
to love to want to need
to swim freely to feel the sharp edges
and still remain
even if it is easy to get confused
in these spaces between:
black sands from eroded fragments
of volcanoes; nothing is so grand
that it can escape judgments
of the elements, naturally
in these spaces between, there are stories:
a whole beach of sea glass, free from scars
of stinging invertebrates, splendor fashioned
from remnants of earthquake
(even land can shake its foundations
and force the world into something new)
Audrey T. Carroll is the author of the What Blooms in the Dark (ELJ Editions, 2024) and Parts of Speech: A Disabled Dictionary (Alien Buddha Press, 2023). Her writing has appeared in Lost Balloon, CRAFT, JMWW, Bending Genres, and others. She is a bi/queer/genderqueer and disabled/chronically ill writer. She serves as a Diversity & Inclusion Editor for the Journal of Creative Writing Studies, and as a Fiction Editor for Chaotic Merge Magazine. She can be found at http://AudreyTCarrollWrites.weebly.com and @AudreyTCarroll on Twitter/Instagram.