Hey folks! My poem, “Color (A Modest Plea)” was republished at the brand new Autism and Empathy website today. The website is dedicated to busting myths and debunking the common stereotype that autistic people are incapable of empathy. Go check it out!
-Nicole
If you try to look into my eyes
you might succeed, if only for a moment
until I feel your gaze incise
and my skin wires buzz with too much current.
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Perhaps
if I could unravel the threads that ever live behind my skin, I could
find it. There are so many exposed, raw and frayed ends,
and as I have said before,
I pull on them so that you don’t. Watch me
pull away this sweater of a skin, blow the dust off
my bones, and climb the stairs to an attic
that ever collects: there is nothing sacred and safe
from being stolen from walls, from projector screens,
or from the air. Everything is carried home, purloined
beneath the archway of my arm,
slumbering against ribs cradled with adipose and skin,
nestled in the crook of my elbow.
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i. zero
Nobody knows that this thing
isn’t a bandit: it doesn’t seize you suddenly
and leave you awash in open wire and stereo speakers
jammed into your ears. There is only the
curious brown baby, eyes like cameras,
with a wound-up roll of film for a brain.
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You, perceptive enough to pick up
all the half-rhymes hanging out in your stomach;
you, with a galvanized ear leading to tubules
that course straight up into your brain;
you, possessing databanks built out of flesh
humming in data process heaven just behind your bone walls;
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I.
I’ve been collecting music and pouring it into the coffers of my brain
since I was fifteen. It took a few years for me to understand
that the stereo inside my cranial walls needed more stuff to spin, so I
reached out in raven-claw fashion, stealing everything
I could get my ears on. Trailing behind me is the umbra
of a greedy teenage girl trapped in a good two-shoes, church girl headlock
while sneaking sonic pleasures through the back door of
her ears. Hey all you people that tryin’ to sleep,
I’m out to make it with my midnight dream.
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You’d think me rude, but I’d just stand and stare
while grocery store aisles used to jostle together,
every box and can a hungry puzzle piece
looking for its partner;
or the colors on every shirt, sweater, pant, and shoe
in every department store peeled themselves apart from their host
in paint by numbers precision and begged for my eye
to roll call. You’d think me strange,
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Dear Dad: have you ever seen the
burning blade, the straight edge of a knife’s
tongue? From this, we are branded with bruises. This silence,
this tradition of disguise, is a generational curse,
a baton passed from Grandma to you to
me – and I am still running.
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There is a box. It is
wooden, a mistreated servant made out of
rot and blood stains. It holds
some of my years, the ones where
the mirror looked like broken teeth and empty
bedrooms. Sycamore legs that looked like
fear, shaking and stripped of bark to show
the white underneath. Prom nights, spent at home,
full of wishes that I could emerge, full-winged, instead of
an earthbound thing, soft and hairy, many-legged, with a upturned belly
like a dog’s fear gone white and asking for teeth. And a
tattered gospel, its chapter and verse preached to me
in slaps and insults.
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You think that I’m brave to tug at my own skin,
pull on the little ends of yarn that I see poking out:
little parades of frayed cotton trees in every color. I have
thousands of them, most of them congregating up and down
my spine. But the truth is,
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I used to believe in you.
Your name was Normal. You were a fantastic idol,
a phantasm made out of God, pedestal-high,
queen of all things that I could never touch. You
wore my face like perfection even better than I did. Body
shrunken to the size of late night cock dreams. You
had no script, nothing to consult – the words were just
sliding through your brain, reconstructing every synapse like
mere connections between hemisphere and region were not
enough. And I,
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Mona Lisa
It takes twelve years to paint her smile.
Feel your own lips, read the Braille in their contours.
Pull ribbons of secrets from under your tongue.
Whisper them onto the canvas.
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