10-toed antenna (it/its/it5elf) is the cure8or of Ↄalamari Arↄhive, makes music as Sound Furies + blogs at 5cense.com. It has never taken a writing class (its academic background is in math + then physics/philosophy) + is afflicted by Ménière’s (deaf in 1 ear + constant “10-itus” that it “2ns in2”), clanging syndrome + number-form synesthesia/dyslexia, in addition to probably being “on the spectrum.”
BACK TO ISSUE BACK TO FOLIOback in my day,
there was no such thing as autism
there was the asylum.
can you believe it?
what a slander.
this bothers me deeply.
why do people insist
on naming every little strange thing?
just because human history
is a history of taxonomy?
everyone is a little autistic.
oh come on,
it’s just
your little silly thing.
my uncle
was like that too
a wild creature.
and he wasn’t autistic,
not at all.
I liked him.
my nephew,
he’s three, he’s autistic,
and you
don’t look like him.
my nephew’s a good kid.
I like him too.
nowadays,
everyone
wants to be autistic!
it’s an epidemic,
a trend
they must be buying diagnoses,
that’s the only explanation!
must be the pesticides in the tomatoes.
or half of them are fake.
can you imagine
a woman
being autistic?
you must be hysterical, or
have that light kind of autism
don’t you?
you’re nothing like
my blue angel.
It ‘s just…
you don’t look autistic.
you just want to enjoy
all the endless perks
of being autistic
like, for example
Maria Emanuelle Cardoso was born on November 15, 2000, in Montes Claros, Minas Gerais, Brazil. Her first book, titled Amarelo Mostarda, is being published by Editora Nauta (2024). Prior to the book, her work has appeared in anthologies and literary magazines (Há quarenta e seis pés, Totem&Pagu, Cassandra, Aboio, Ruído Manifesto, Casa Inventada, Oficina Literária da Revista Cult, Cupim). She won second place in the Poesia Agora Summer 2021 Prize (Trevo) and took part in Clipe Poesia 2023 at Casa das Rosas. Instagram: el___maria.
BACK TO ISSUE BACK TO FOLIOWhen a person creates life, they are called a mother
but when a building is the foundation for that child’s development,
it’s hard not to consider them my babies just the same.
I have been with them since the first formed memories.
Their first friend. Their first crush.
The first lesson in surviving social jungles.
The first leap of faith when they play hooky during 3rd period.
I was the first safe haven they had
until I was their last…
Their last cry in the bathroom as they screamed for their mother.
Their last breath in a pool of blood on the concrete of a breezeway.
I broke brick and bone to make room for my babies
only for my body to be made into a death trap and
I tried to protect them as a mother should,
tried to hide them in the folds of my safe spaces,
made my walls thick enough to shield them from ricochets and
locked doors that kept them from the range of a shotgun–
I thought I could protect them but
I can still hear their screams echoing through my chest.
Is it not the burden of a mother to give her children the world
only to watch in fear when someone crushes it?
Is being a mother as a permanent as they say it is or
is it pending the withdrawal of a child’s life?
When a newborn dies before 20 weeks,
it is known as a spontaneous abortion.
When an intruder interrupts a nine month school year,
we call it Columbine.
We call it Virginia Tech.
We call it Robb Elementary.
We call it everything except sterilization.
People say the children are our future
but do nothing to stop them from becoming hashtagged into history.
It’s hard to feel like anything more than a mortuary
with all these unclaimed miscarriages in my womb.
I don’t know which hurts worse:
being riddled with bullets or riddled with guilt.
My babies needed a savior but I am no Jesus.
I have no resurrection to offer them.
I tried my best to hold them holy
but the bodies keep slipping through the bullet holes in my hands.
You wonder why your thoughts and prayers don’t mean a thing…
They don’t protect my babies from your negligence.
They don’t clean up this crime scene you made of me.
This is your fault!
Every one of you that would rather ban books
to shield children from hidden truths
but not the guns that turn my libraries into graveyards.
Now, instead of autographing yearbooks,
I have death certificates to sign on lockers in .32 caliber cursive.
When a child is taken from this life before having a chance to live it,
we call it unfair.
When a mother is distraught after losing the life they’ve birthed,
it is called grief,
but when I am a school house that made itself a home
for the life that was taken unfairly…
a building that birthed experiences and personalities
now filled with still framed smiles and blood stained dreams…
Do I get to call this unfair?
Do I get to call this grief
when mourning children I didn’t bring into this world?
Am I allowed to feel anything at all?
Because if not,
I do not know what to call this then.
Quin Killin’ is a poet, advocate, and performer who brings Liberty City, Miami with them everywhere they go. They have had their works featured on platforms such as African Writer, Button Poetry, The Bitchin’ Kitsch, and WUSF Arts Axis and is the current editor-in-chief of The Blunt Space’s digital literary magazine, Defiance and Dialogue. With an MFA in Creative Writing from Stetson University, they live life as a part-time blerd, a full-time AuDHD, introverted Negro, and moonlights as a comedic, smart mouth. Quin can be found on Substack @queenybihh, Spill & Instagram @queeny_bihh, and YouTube @Quin Killin The Poet.
BACK TO ISSUE BACK TO FOLIOWe hide in plain sight they say, as if something sinister
à la RFK Jr. to Trump, Asperger to Hitler. So many
girls & women unnamed. Boys & men four times
more likely to get a diagnosis. But this is not a disease,
not something only boys who love trains & walk on their toes
can have, though I, a girl/woman, did walk on my toes.
When I read of that symptom in a book, I gasped;
I was just figuring it out & over the age of 40,
remembering my parents took me to the doctor
for toe-walking beyond when a toddler would stop
& though none of my children toe-walked,
each have their uniqueness & one of my sons
as he struggled young, ADHD, I was questioning, reading
like so many mothers, a light started to glow,
go off in my brain & when one magnificent female student
of mine, student who wore a lanyard brightly stating
I am autistic & was her whole self in my classroom
when she folded paper into intricate shapes & fidgeted
all through class, when she wore sunglasses
in the awful florescent light, when she brought me
a houseplant she propagated when we found
we shared a special interest, when she shared
her other interest was keeping roly-polies as pets
in a box in her window well, I was reminded of myself
as a child & the toads in my window well I kept as pets
& she wrote the best poems out of everyone in the class
& when she sat underneath her desk during lecture
without fanfare or apparent shame & which I didn’t think odd,
instead, I felt . . . envy, seeing my secret behavior on display.
Not only as a child, but as an adult, in my apartment
I would sit underneath my desk after coming home
from some social thing, when feeling overwhelmed,
I felt the little cave the desk made could hold the world,
keep it from crushing me, the glass shell around me,
& in that remembering, the message on her lanyard
glowed bright & with sunflowers surrounding the words,
I am autistic. That word autistic familiar, thrown around
about my eccentric, engineer father throughout my childhood
when my mother heard about Aspergers, but I thought
because I didn’t like math, didn’t build computers,
it couldn’t be me. Never mind how I didn’t, couldn’t
talk in school until fourth grade, I was labeled gifted
& shy. Never mind my anxiety & depression &
obsessions, how even now, after I participate
in some poetry event, I can’t sleep, dissect it all night
& friends say I’d never know. Here I am, writing poems.
Eugenicists take note, my autistic student was the most
talented student in the room & though the label is not
magic, it’s a way of living in this brain,
fuck a cure for who we are,
after forty years of What Is Wrong With Me?,
this was my answer, bright sunflower.
We are diagnosed General Anxiety
We are diagnosed Panic Disorder
& at least three Phobias (wind, flying, food in restaurants)
We are not a monolith (the ‘we’ is me
& maybe you)
We are diagnosed Depression, Suicidal Ideation.
You don’t think we are autistic
& feel very free to tell us so.
Wearing tights & dresses sent us into fits as children.
(you could sustain a crying fit longer than anyone
I had ever seen, Mother says.)
Yes, our mothers caused trauma, were angry
at what we were, weren’t.
But they had no idea & no help. Especially for those of us
invisible, labeled just shy, gifted.
(No one else’s children ran away and hid during their birthday parties,
didn’t want to be looked at, Mother says,
You fell down crying in the kitchen every day after school
for all of first grade, but couldn’t say why)
We didn’t know why, could not articulate out loud.
Very early on, we wondered why we had to be born.
We started writing down what we couldn’t speak.
We rehearsed before we spoke.
We know you cannot imagine this now
unless you knew us when
in the time before masks we mastered.
A misguided man who swims in muck
states, your cure is coming—no vaccines,
food coloring. Not knowing
my genes (Or does he know?
Which is more frightening?)
Paternal side—cousin, brother, father,
Maybe the grandfather who struggled,
drank, unalived. Ironically he was born
in Vienna, birthplace of the diagnosis,
and Asperger’s base. What good
intentions A. may have started with
ended with the evil whims of
a regime. America, where
are we going? My grandfather
was still lucky to leave Austria
before the war. Never mind his other
failures—through him, I am here.
“Too much like a Solmer,”
my mother used to despair
for me when I wanted to unalive.
Psychic mediums were more helpful
than therapists. I had a kick-ass one
for twenty years; we’d talk annually.
She kept me alive, my “spiritual counselor,”
and the poems and the people
who would let me talk, “info dump”
(I didn’t know there was a word for that)
without judgment, a couple best friends
we labeled ourselves “weird” and “crazy,”
lovingly, not once knowing the word
“neurodivergent.” You will not eradicate us
with a lack of vaccine, food coloring.
In the spectrum-y world, we will continue
To keep saving ourselves.
We will wear blanket hoodies unironically.
We will wear what you’ve called “weird outfits,” colorful,
unmatched, our favorite childhood cartoons.
When we feel comfortable with you, we will look
off in the distance when talking and try not to notice
how you turn your head to see what we’re looking at.
We might bring out our fidgets around you
and at work, especially the squishy ones.
We will even explain the issue with the fluorescent lights
and sit in the dark room with headphones while grading.
We will look back on our lives—a mess—and understand it.
We used to feel shame after graduating cum laude
and working 13 years in the grocery store.
And then checking the Master’s Degree box
on the welfare papers for so many years.
We were paying our taxes, don’t worry, and working full time
but for those who cannot, please use my tax money for them.
Stop dropping bombs, kidnapping, deporting.
It literally hurts to watch the news.
The anxiety gets worse unless we’re too low to feel.
We fight it every day, leave the house, deal with the
disassociation when we meet friends at the museum.
Let the panic pass and wash over us
when we feel we’re not real.
Don’t get me started on romance.
We will self-diagnose, join autistic women
groups online, and understand all of our relationships
finally.
Natalie Solmer was born and raised in South Bend, Indiana, and is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Indianapolis Review. Before becoming an Associate Professor of English at Ivy Tech Community College, she was a horticulturalist and grocery store florist for 13 years. Her poetry has been featured in Verse Daily and published in places such as North American Review, Pleiades, Notre Dame Review, Mom Egg Review, and The Glacier. Find her at nataliesolmer.com.
BACK TO ISSUE BACK TO FOLIOI am learning how to be weakness leaving the body.
I am licking citric atlas critic acid off my fingers.
Every day is keep doing my tasks keep reminding and head down.
Nobody minds the back kept slant until straight again.
My name are looking for rooms among all the names the
all the other names.
My Sarah looking for its girl among its mother.
A name is looking for more cells to burn.
I am learning to learn appropriating the hurts of others
Is the wrong kind of sorrow.
Doesn’t suit this age of me.
Doesn’t suit this plane of me, too flat, too full,
Too echoes.
I have viewed suffering as a sign of power. Why
Am I suffering at the edge of submission?
I just encountered a sharp ugly comfort
But it was not the product of my mind.
It is hard to want to die when everything is wanting to die
and hard to live.
I want to say: when you are a child, there is no escape. The hell is a silence. There is a hot yellow room. So you might as well as be hot yellow with it. This is the room of the dentist’s chair, the room that the doctor enters with his big needle. Where the kind woman in her glasses and her sweater will watch me play and make her studious demands. All this while, there is a temperate buzzing.
The room could be anywhere. Buzz could be anything. The point’s hot yellow. Shouts expand to fill our faces, sweat us like pigs. The nearby windows behold curtains and the sun flies in to lick my tired face. Assurances are made that the door is wide open. Transparency walks in and seduces before I know it is anything at all. And indeed there are doors here
there are windows even hidey-holes, but there is no escape from that great, piercing light, bright as a streetlight exposed in the raw hours before dawn. The light that detected my movements and warmed my scalp formed a hood around my head. A hood, but I was a child; the rest saw a halo. I wanted to scream.
*
(I wanted to scream. Beneath my halo, maggots, the maggots that led me to the playwoman her clipboard and gap tooth. It began when I plunged my hand into a bag of white rice and felt it squirm between my fingers. The rice was enchanted with maggots, cuddling their larvae. My father cooked the rice and served it to me with peas and carrots.
There are dead things in here, I tried to explain. Across the rice and vegetables laid a vague brown gloss, oil above the water. It bubbled and spat. It collected in small bubbles in the pan’s round corners.
Everything we eat is either fake or dead, he said. He laughed and I began to buzz and sweat. I was a fly. No place to lie
down.
It was moving, I said at the table, affronted by the oil dish before me. I said: The rice. The things in the rice. The same rice as here.
Just eat your food.
When I attempted to refuse he began mocking me and then when the mocking did not work he got angry. Finish Your Dinner he said. Italicized and with capital letters. And then again, this time said booming. When I didn’t Finish My Dinner he pried my jaw apart and scooped spoonfuls into my mouth. Too quick for me to spit. I had no choice but to swallow the dead maggots.
I did not look at the rice after that incident. It didn’t happen again. But the room grew hotter and closer and yellower. Bad things came up in me like whispers: cavities, moods. My appendix. And I was still too many pieces for me to manage. And to carry my whole self inside me and with me and on me and had me crouching, crouching because I was not only holding my own body up, but also the maggot-light.)
BACK TO ISSUE BACK TO FOLIOWinter has left us & now is the summer of autism
screams. The dandelions rock back & forth in
their chairs outside the new flag they put up
drying in the sunlight & I’m lost in a vintage
store with yellow lights yellow brights
yellow mites the color of waiting
in a hospital room of when my grandmother had cancer
& when I will have my breasts removed. Artificial banana
syrup & fertilizer — the smells of my friend’s cat. Chicken poop,
chocolate, childhood where I sit reading the magic school
bus all day & where my favorite book was the manual of infant
illnesses & where I played doctor w my imaginary
friends. Such good patients, they were. I wonder if any
of my toys were self diagnosed too. The council of stuffed
animals have met & discussed your accommodation
request – congratulations! You’ve been branded
one of us. Magnolia bloom & it’s the season I
walk on my tiptoes too – can people who walk with their
entire feet not see the worms drowning in all this
air? After each storm each law each angry face
book post: noli me tangere. Every iamb a promise of not
hurting: I will tread your way. I will (try &) not step
on you. I want to lie the fuck down & I will today.
Come, and I dare you. Step over me too.
Yufan Lu (they/them) is a writer from Beijing, China. They’re a recent graduate of Kenyon College and a current MA student at the University of British Columbia. Their works have been published in HIKA, Lyceum, and Periwinkle Pelican, and will be published in beestung.
BACK TO ISSUE BACK TO FOLIOafter Jericho Brown
Humanity is more than capacity:
Autism is a site of resistance.
Autism is a site of resistance,
What do you fear of those who can’t conform?
What do you fear of those who won’t conform?
Complacency is key to fascism.
When you fascists demand complacency,
Diversity is a mark of freedom.
Our freedom is marked by diversity,
Conformity, a death wish for Disableds.
We Disableds wish death to conformity!
That which truly liberates, liberates all.
That which frees us, shall also free you:
Humanity is more than capacity.
Tiezst “Tie” Taylor is a Disabled Black femme who is non-binary trans. They are a radical educator, artist-activist, poet, and storyteller. Their work explores their experiences in surviving intersecting forms of oppression in the U.S. Tiezst is an Emerge 2025 Fellow with San Francisco State University’s Paul K. Longmore Institute on Disability where they are working on an essay for publication on the criminalization of mental illness as it intersects with Black woman / femme identity. They were a Spring 2024 Brooklyn Poets Fellow and a past awardee of the NYSCA/NYFA Artists with Disabilities Grant. Follow Tiezst on Instagram @tiezst.
BACK TO ISSUE BACK TO FOLIOthere’s little ease
in a life of library lunches,
wall-sitting,
everything full volume
ear-lancing cacophony,
but there is infinite literary possibility
in experiencing this vividly,
dedicating ourselves so thoroughly, silently
people-watching,
microscopic magnified, personified
everything. I don’t know
how to pen Hallmark poems,
I don’t gaze into eyes
enough to describe them,
but I notice
the places skin pulls taut, slacks wrinkle;
I see someone playing
with a tag hanging at their waist
or a smile on their face,
trying to place the emotion behind it;
I commit bitten stout nails
and clavicle constellations
to memory. we are not just writing
poetry, but living it embodied
for any who care to hear echolalia
humming like a fridge, echolalia
collaborations flickering lens echolalia
the truest communication echolalia
of motion, of routine, of ideas, of being seen.
even overload,
the fire blanket, the airbag,
is like my poems:
saying what I cannot,
what I may not even understand,
pure adrenaline tearing
then settling
into rare silence,
pleasant emptiness.
do not let their limited creativity
paint ours as anything, but
inextricable,
boundless.
Maxwell O’Toole compulsively creates. An emerging disabled and trans writer, he is particularly inspired by his activist work, using art to connect with himself, others, and our world. He has pieces published/forthcoming with UNESCO Chair, Chartium, The Muse Zine, Freefall Magazine, Vellichor Literary, and Poets.ca. Maxwell lives with his partner and their cats in St. Catharines, Ontario, traditional territory of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe peoples. For more information, visit @maxwellwriteswell on Instagram or sites.google.com/view/maxwellwriteswell.
BACK TO ISSUE BACK TO FOLIOThese are kids who will never pay for spray tan.
They’ll never hold a pen to sign
deportation orders. They’ll never play
neutral to an invader and the people bloodied and collapsed
They’ll never write executive orders. They’ll never go out
with Republicans. Many of them will never use
a woman’s body for their unpermitted pleasure.
These are kids who will never pave over historic
rose gardens. They’ll never hold
the security clearance to know how much of what we live on, we stole.
They’ll never play Risk with real soldiers.
They’ll never write this poem. They’ll never go
to prom. Many of them will never
wear jeans or itchy gowns.
These are kids who will never feel comfortable
in gas masks. They’ll never know the joy of belonging
to a line tapping out a riot shield beat. They’ll never wear
bullet proof vests. They’ll never scale walls
they haven’t imagined. Many of them will never imagine
a world you’ll understand.
These are kids who will never pay for lip fillers, art
-fully broken bones. They’ll never know the pleasure of connection
found in small talk and shared
financial advisors. They’ll never plot
a real coup—or not one they can rally masses to—they’ll never
win. They’ll never go
to Washington. Many of them will never leave
home on weekends.
These are kids who will never give teeth to gears.
They’ll never feel comfortable keeping teeth either.
They’ll never stop probing their teeth with their tongues.
They’ll never fit in.
They’ll never stop rocking.
Many of them will never be found.
Elizabeth Kate Switaj (elizabethkateswitaj.net) is a neurodivergent poet originally from Seattle and currently living on Majuro Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Her sequence, The Articulations, was published in 2024 as part of a tête-bêche from Kernpunkt Press; her chapbook, Serial Experiments, was published this year by Alien Buddha Press. Her second full-length collection of poetry, The Bringers of Fruit: An Oratorio (11:11 Press, 2022), won the 2023 Whirling Prize.
BACK TO ISSUE BACK TO FOLIO people are like cities in that you need
three apps to navigate them without getting lost
& at least a few furtive DMs in the bathroom
of a crumbling theatre venue & you still don’t know
where to find your trinkets and eternities lost—
you fall asleep in the void that fills my lungs
& i sing rumors and false promises to you
then take a does she like me? quiz on the internet
and feel like an idiot. only you could make me
have a public freakout in the middle of
a suburb that is every suburb that is every dilapidated TV set
that is every worldbuilding project i abandoned
when i was three & you say all of two words and i stretch out
every syllable like an anthem & make a mixtape for you then
swear that it was about an OC. keep finding ways to tell you
that only make me look pathetic—because asking if you want
our d&d characters to date is easier—than asking you to gently
undo me like the glow of unspoken desires and blue light, blue moods,
am i alive?
mk zariel {it/its} is a transmasculine neuroqueer poet, theater artist, movement journalist, and insurrectionary anarchist. it is fueled by folk-punk, Emma Goldman, and existential dread. it can be found online at mkzariel.carrd.co/, creating conflictually queer-anarchic spaces, writing columns for Asymptote and the Anarchist Review of Books, and being mildly feral in the great lakes region. it is kinda gay ngl.
BACK TO ISSUE BACK TO FOLIO