My poem, “Glass and Concrete” was republished over at the Autism and Empathy website.
Autism and Empathy seeks “to undo the myths about autism and empathy that have stigmatized autistic people for so long”. The site features prose and poetry by autistics, family members, parents, and professionals. If you haven’t seen it yet, I encourage you to go and read.
-Nicole
Greetings, readers!
“High School Jungle” was published in Hyperlexia Journal on Friday, October 14. It was written about my own experiences with being bullied in high school.
Hyperlexia Journal is a literary journal about the autism spectrum that publishes poetry, fiction, and personal essays. The editors of Hyperlexia seek “genuine and truthful writing about autism”.
Greetings! My poem, “Color (A Modest Plea)“, was published today in Shift Journal of Alternatives: Neurodiversity and social change.
As you might surmise from the journal’s title, the journal’s premise is that autism has existed all along and it entertains “the notion of autistic as a legitimate way to be in the world, from the crossroads of theory, society, and personal experience”.
The poem was inspired by a piece by Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg of Journeys with Autism which appeared earlier this month in Shift Journal, “An Open Letter to Robert MacNeil Regarding PBS’ Autism Now Series“. I used the same quote by Robert MacNeil from the series to jump-start this poem as one of my NaPoWriMo poems. Please jog over to Shift Journal to read it, and check out the many other contributions in the journal about autism and neurodiversity.
-Nicole
Greetings! The folks over at Winning Writers published an announcement about the Naturally Autistic Award in the Adult International Literary Category and also reprinted one of the poems from the collection, “You Don’t See It,” in the Winter 2010 edition their newsletter. To read, go here.
And BTW, I highly encourage people to subscribe. There is a lot of information about contests and they publish calls for submissions within.
-Nicole
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Stumble It!
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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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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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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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