I am the tough brittle outside and the soft missing
inside….the shell’s eye where spiral begins its exuberant spin
out to the world’s lip….foot….beach
contained it stops…..opens to possibility,
the invisible centre on the eye’s other side
where caverns echo stills….and sound
becomes silence.
Trace a finger along the remembered lines…cross
their hatchings… try to read the inscription
on this abandoned vessel
this cup of life
relic of its moist sleek inhabitant calling you
to bake in its hot….red centre….to reconstruct
space not as four walls and a ceiling
but as a whorl
of energy without barriers
soundless…..unreadable.
•••
Kim Aubrey is a Bermudian writer living in Canada. Her story collection, What We Hold In Our Hands, is forthcoming with Demeter Press, November, 2013. Kim is Associate Editor and Nonfiction Editor for Grain Magazine, an editor for Red Claw Press, and Director of Writers’ Workshop in Bermuda.
tongues of the ocean 
K.D. Miller
Beautiful! I especially like “this abandoned vessel
this cup of life.”
Thank you, Kim!