Poem

our translucent bodies

by Devin Miller

Poems from the Series “Infinite Branches: Queer Speculative Disability Poetry in Conversation” — Guest Edited by Toby MacNutt. Each entry in this series includes a poem and the poet’s response to another poet in the series.

Image created by Holly Lyn Walrath, Interstellar Flight Press

our translucent bodies

we have become translucent as jellyfish; the water has changed us. it happened slowly. over time I learned the shape of my mother’s bones, the seagrass strands of my sister’s veins, the shivering of my love’s heart. our skin still resists the pressure of fingernails and jagged shells and the deep. it still protects us. but we are not safe; we are changing.

the cold sea tastes different to us than it did to our grandmothers. rocks where we used to sun ourselves see only water-rippled dimness.

our bodies’ borders have become invisible. I reach for my sister’s wrist bone and grip too tightly; I press my teeth to the curve of my love’s belly and cannot see I have left marks, have left scars, have left tenderness behind me. though it’s hard to forget we are fragile, when we can see each pulse, each expanding and contracting of each other’s lungs.

the fish still shimmer when they swim within reach of the sunlight. the whales are still massive grey islands, bulky bodies in the dark. only we, we people of the salt, have changed.

we look to the jellyfish for advice. how do you love a person you can see through? how do you bury dark truths in a belly full of starlight? how do you swim onwards, knowing you may never reach safety?

and the jellyfish tell us: every creature is more than the curve of its domed translucence, more than its shaking tendrils.

we have become translucent as jellyfish, but they have taught us: swim onwards. let your darkness sink to the ocean floor. love the sinew and spine of your family. you may never reach safety or stop changing, but swim onwards. you cannot see all the way through the ocean.

Formatting Description

Left-aligned uncapitalized text in dense stanzas.

Downloadable PDF

(PDF)

Link to Poem on Interstellar Flight Press Website

(LINK)

Poem Acknowledgments

Originally appeared in Mermaids Monthly in June 2021.

Author’s Statement on “our translucent bodies”

When I originally wrote “our translucent bodies” in 2020, I intended it as a speculative climate change poem — what if climate change changed the bodies of merpeople? It was quite odd, and surprisingly emotional, to reread it in 2025, looking for disability themes in my poetry, and to find them. I have just as much chronic illness as I did five years ago, but I have more interest in it now; it’s come to feel like a more salient part of my identity. But subconsciously, it’s always shaped my writing; I’ve always been interested in how weird and squishy and flimsy bodies can be, as is obvious from this poem.

This is an excessively “me” poem because it’s sapphic and because it’s about the sea. A truly shocking percentage of my writing is about beaches and saltwater. You could probably play a drinking game with the word “kelp” in my poetry. The beach in Lorenzo’s poem, “firefly in a graveyard,” was one of the things that resonated between that poem and mine. The other was the structuring element of asking for advice.

I’m an optimistic person who writes optimistic things, and I hope a realist kind of optimism is what people take from “our translucent bodies.” Things might be weird and difficult, in the world or in your own life, but jellyfish are there to teach you something about how to cope with it. I write a lot about beaches because I grew up playing on muddy, rocky, barnacle-covered beaches in the Pacific Northwest. These are not the idyllic beaches of golden sand people picture when they imagine a relaxing, comforting beach, but that’s part of what I like about them. The weird, squidgy animals you find on a PNW beach are so much more interesting than pristine sand.

It’s not only the theme of changing bodies that now strikes me as a disability theme. I also see resonance with both queerness and disability in the idea that when things are weird and difficult, and may not get better, all you can do is keep swimming forward.

It is strange and delightful to find a whole new layer of meaning in what was already one of my favorite of my poems. I hope folks enjoy it.

About the Author

Devin Miller is a queer, genderqueer cyborg and lifelong denizen of Seattle, with a love of muddy beaches to show for it. Their short fiction has appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, PodCastle, and Strange Horizons; their poetry received an honorable mention in the 2022 Rhysling Awards and once appeared on a King County Metro bus terminal. You can find Devin under a tree, probably, or at devzmiller.com.

About the Series “Infinite Branches: Queer Speculative Disability Poetry in Conversation” — Guest Edited by Toby MacNutt

*Infinite Branches* is a round-robin anthology of queer disabled poets. Poets choose their own poems in response to the poet preceding them, and each group of poets concludes with a discussion of their work in the context of each other. Facilitation for choices, statements, and discussion was done by Toby MacNutt.

Interstellar Flight Magazine publishes essays on what’s new in the world of speculative genres. In the words of Ursula K. Le Guin, we need “writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope.” Visit our Patreon to join our fan community on Discord. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.