MELISSA BERNAL AUSTIN

The body calls all its missing pieces back to itself,

from that bedroom floor, that bathroom, a street,
from will you let him? Let him titfuck you? The choir
room, a sidewalk. Greedy,

bodiless hands, seeking and finding and taking
and taking and slipping back into wrist joint,
into pockets, finding lighters, lighting cigarettes.
Like nothing.

There are robots designed to satisfy nearly all
secret hungers, without the danger of intimacy, of
asking. Of witness. The article said these robots
could be hacked, made to kill instead, and I say good.
I sometimes wished I could be something so clean
and bloodless. To be everything enough to be
nothing.

Bless this love I have of look at this weird spot, of can you
cut the back of my hair where I missed, of can you scratch
here and can you feel that, can you press there. That doesn't come
empty-handed. What freedom — to lower my face to the river's edge
and drink, eyes closed.

There are soft robots, vining through buildings' pipes, moving
like roots. Questioning, curious tips, meeting and choosing
to touch and shift, to touch and curl around. Unfurling
liquidly, from their middles, they choose. The right of all
soft things.

Bless this love I have that touches my hair without motive.
This love I have that leaves me be.

Winter has fingered its way down into dark soil, readying seeds:
Milkweed, Sycamore, Echinacea, Cherry, which
must freeze first, before they can       crack open. There, in the
Deeper Deep, unseen mycelial tendrils still move. Not-yet-buds begin
their secret shimmy and hum. Flirt with the idea of the light, alone.

When my pleasure is mine alone I can find it anywhere. I can
come and go and it is always right where I left it. I can pick it back up
like a book, and disappear into it. I read once

if you keep touching a Venus Fly Trap, just to
watch it close itself around what it thinks is a meal,
you will kill it. They can only re-open so many times
without being properly fed.

Jacaranda

It's just that there are names of flowers so good
I almost don't want to see the flower itself.
Like Jacaranda. Which I have probably seen
without knowing I was seeing Jacaranda,
so I've never seen it, and I'm happy about that.
And you cannot change my mind.

Also I wear my skin around all day
like a dress I get bored trying to describe and
it itches in inconvenient spots.
I sometimes wish I could just take it off, to feel again
being 5 years old and at home after Easter Mass,
the sensation of Just My Slip
on my little minnow body. So quick and small I could disappear into light.
Could wiggle free of confusion's grip. I'm angry
now that I know the body and mind are not separate.

And like, our brains are not computers, and I know it
because we can't download languages lickety-split.
We just can't.

But computers can't make music that doesn't sound like math.
Which is fine I guess, if you like that sort of thing.
It's just that it's more exciting to hear something and think,
"I have no name for that. No one anywhere
knows how to call that sound in for dinner
when the streetlights come on."

Only a human could make a song and call it Jacaranda,
for no reason other than impulse.
And all these other humans would hear it, and feel different things,
and still agree that Jacaranda is the only possible name
for a song like that.

All the Things the Sky Is

Stood at the bruised mouth of waking, I reach,
cup the dome of the sky, turn it over, a bowl
to wash my feet in. To wash your feet. To cool you.
After this long sunset horizon, backlit walk,
walking backwards into another version
of this day, before the dust caked, before the
clinging goats' heads in the
polycotton of your socks and shoe laces. Backwards
past pricked fingertips and sucking
blood in the bright white sun.

We were in love in the dirt, in Spring winds. Remember us
both back there. Remember it forward into heat-
soft soles of shoes in the Summer that followed like a hungry dog.
Through death and back into life, to seed, to soft
pink inner-lip twitch. Then lips chapped with cold. Now
back again, and further still. Until the end
becomes a disappearing horizon.

I held up the sky from the top of a cold brown mountain.
The glinting dome of everything, a shield
to break ourselves against. A shield for me
to be carried out on. To be turned over,
to wash my body in, its gray blue, purple blue,
bruised lip, hardbit. When we were
breaking ourselves against an early Summer.
The one of the same sunrise again
and again, again, from the top of the mountain, we were
alive and chattering in the pre-sun light, the gray
of an overcooked yolk. Hard as a raised welt.

The bowl of the sky today is a bell.
Today the pink of the inside of a shell.
The sky could hold a whole summer of fruits. No,
today the bowl of the sky is turned like a glass
trapping a fly.

Melissa Bernal Austin is a queer, Latina, writer, educator, herbalist, maker, and El Paso, TX, native, living in West Michigan. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in Longleaf Review, CrabFat Magazine, Funicular Magazine, The Helix, and more. She can be found online @softerpath.