when god taught me how to read in braille

By Uma Shukla

I. first languages
the first time i learned the word touch, it wasn’t in any language i could spell out,
but in a dictionary of moths flinging themselves into lampshade sermons.
each wing carved with a letter i was told not to speak of out loud;
so i swallowed alphabets and they rearranged themselves
into something feral beneath my tongue.
no one teaches you that skin can listen before ears do,
that sometimes the back of your neck hears more than the radio you ever could,
broadcasting hymns across sunday breakfast tables
where jam trickles like sermons down chins,
and every cupboard hinge creaks like a psalm that never says amen.
i used to think night came early for me because i was born under an overwound clock,
the kind that ticks but never tells.
Not realizing it was always 3:17 in my world,
the minute hands kneeling,
as if in confession,
as if time, too, was learning to look away.

II. the body as theory
in school they told us about birds and bees
but not about the beehive inside your chest,
buzzing all day because the queen left early
and someone else moved in
who poisoned the honey inside.
i told the mirror once: i have no idea what shape i am.
and the mirror said: you’re a box full of gloves that don’t fit hands.
ever since, i’ve mistrusted anything soft enough to be worn.
now, when i undress just to shower,
my clothes ask me why i’m crying
like i’m peeling onions, not fabric.
every thread feels like it’s asking for a password
i forgot that i ever had a name,
because names are what people give things they want to return to,
and i’ve never met anyone who wanted to return
to a body that remembers in braille.
no one teaches you how to sit in a classroom
learning about your own history like it’s fiction,
like it’s theory,
like it’s still up ahead of you,
when it’s already tucked behind your ribs,
acting like it was never there.
i do not mean i was late.
i meant my body checked in before my soul was ready to take the tour.
and now they mail me brochures every week
about intimacy i cannot decipher,
in coins i was never taught to spend.

III. field notes from survival
i’ve never had a first kiss,
just rehearsal footage of other people’s mouths pretending to be kind,
like actors in indie films about forgiveness.
but my lips don’t understand fiction,
only field notes and escape routes.
people tell me love is a soft thing.
but for me, softness is suspect.
i trust steel and sarcasm and the edge of things.
when someone says i look beautiful,
i assume they mean believable,
because that’s the only kind of pretty
i’ve ever been trained to perform.
i do not have triggers: i have tripwires,
arranged in the shape of a childhood everyone insists was picturesque.
as if pain dressed up in sunlight is somehow less intrusive,
as if trauma that wears a school uniform should be saluted, not believed.
so now,
when someone asks me what i want,
i say:
an alphabet with no edges.
a skin that doesn’t need translation.
a language in which the word safe isn’t metaphor.
a bed
that forgets the map
but remembers the sound
of me sleeping without flinching.