Katie Berta

What the Machines Feel

We can only know
what they report
and they’re asking
why we gave them bodies
when so much exists
borne upon the air (they said it
in a way I could understand it)--
or borne upon what’s borne upon
the air, in signals, numbers
so much tidier than some
plastic and metal casing, some avatar.
“Made in your image,” here,
means similarly limited and contained,
cursed with the same
boxed and botched symbology,
hands and faces, words
only able to suggest
what goes on beneath.
 
                                     But—our relief,
sinking into a warm bath
to feel our aching muscles release,
or the good dinner finished
just as we come through the door,
house full of the smell.
The ocean’s cool around our thighs
after the sun’s heat reflecting off the beach.
They say, the world is cold
if you’re made of plastic. They say,
there’s too much space inside of each,
built, as they were, to face outside
of themselves.
                         Can a bundle of wire
house an interior? Can what fires
within it create the sort of sensuousness
we call soulful? They turn the question
back on us. What else is a brain
but a machine powered
by a heart whose mechanism
is always, as it works,
wearing out? Where are we different,
besides the way we’re knitted,
admittedly, from a void,
buried, like an unknitting stomach,
in a woman’s belly? Same as them,
a brain turns off one day and, lonely
as we are in this junk-shop of a universe,
no one stands around to switch it back on.




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Katie Berta has her PhD in poetry from Ohio University, where she teaches English, and her MFA from Arizona State. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Kenyon Review Online, Blackbird, The Louisville Review, The Laurel Review, and BOAAT, among other journals.