on my 50th birthday, I have my 50th birthday with my autistic demi-polycule where no one is normal, my two autistic DJs spinning and all my autistic friends I blow out my autistic double coconut birthday cake with my autistic masked face, I write this autistic poem the next day after I lose my autistic verbal speech after six hours of autistic on autistic birthday And point at things as my autistic friends load up our cars with the flowers and clean up the Autistic trans party space. I get autistic adorations like a giant dunkin donut thermos and two sorry for have great tits and correct opinions T shirts that are just slightly different, so I can work them into my autistic uniform lineup of 10 black miniskirts and a bunch of t shirts that say shit like this I go home to sleep, a childless cat non lady, diagonal in my autistic bigbed with my cat purring, after getting a midnight kiss from a lover who said they could always claim adhd but not autism til last year bc they were like, well, I can sort of survive capitalism? None of us are surviving capitalism that well and I almost didn’t have this party because the asshole in chief was going to launch the insurrection act but corny as it sounds, yes we are an insurrection- this shout of unregistered autistic trans joy, screaming the stevie wonder happy birthday song through our masked autistic faces, loving on my masked autistic 50 year old surviving ass as I blow out all the autistic candles.
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (they/them) is a nonbinary femme disabled writer/poet disability and transformative justice movement worker and renowned hot freak bitch forever 38 looking baby illder of Burgher and Tamil Sri Lankan, Irish and Ukrainian/Galician/Roma ascent. They are the author or co-editor of ten books, including The Future Is DIsabled: Prophecies, Love Notes and Mourning Songs, Beyond Survival: Stories and Strategies from the Transformative Justice Movement (co-edited with Ejeris Dixon), Tonguebreaker, and Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice. A Lambda and Jeanne Córdova Award winner, five-time Publishing Triangle shortlister and longtime disabled QTBIPOC space maker, they are currently building The Stacey Park MIlbern Liberation Arts Residency, as far as they know the only writers residency by and for disabled QTBIPOC writers. Follow them at brownstargirl.org and llps.substack.com. Raised in Worcester, MA, they currently live in Lenapehoking/Philly.
I 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.
Hot Yellow Room: A GhostPoem
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.)
[sarah] Cavar is the author of Failure to Comply (featherproof books, 2024) and Differential Diagnosis (Northwestern University Press, 2026), with genre-nonconforming writing in Kairos, The Rumpus, Transgender Studies Quarterly, Electric Lit, and elsewhere. They hold a PhD in Cultural Studies with a concentration in Science & Technology Studies from the University of California: Davis, and are interested in the politics of queercrip & transMad knowledge production. More at cavar.club, @cavar on bluesky, and at librarycard.beehiiv.com.
We 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.
Girl On The Spectrum Manifesto, no. 2
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.
Girl On The Spectrum Manifesto, no. 3
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.
Girl On The Spectrum Manifesto, no. 4
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.
When 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 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.
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.”
If they come for trans people, I will not be able to leave. I feel like a plastic mug, I am bound to certain places. My mother says I should not be afraid of the fascists. I ask my father if he still loves me if I cannot work. I tell my father that my gender differs from the one I was assigned at birth. It’s the same call. All my friends bring fidget toys to the plenum. We destroy the system on crip time. My mother sees no sense in visible resistance. I ask her how I can exist then I walk on bare feet and bite my fingernails. The welfare office wants to determine if I am eligible for getting a diagnosis. The welfare office wants me to kill myself. My friends and I gather around the neurobox. I can write you a poem with communication cards. I can write you a blackout poem out of welfare application documents. My friends and I we barely exist. My friends and I we exist barely. Head shorn, feet quite firmly on the ground. Today I wear nothing but a binder. I am a plastic mug, not easily broken.
Willow Bram Desjardins (they/them) is a writer from northern Germany, currently studying philosophy. Their poems revolve around queer embodiment, disability, and sometimes around ducks. They have work published in Corporeal and The Reprise. In their free time they are found crafting or hanging out at local goth events.
Cento for Autistic Poets Whose Words Offer a Map of Possibility When My Words Are Lost
I wish I could write poems where the poem’s alive marched, hands in the dirt, head in the sun – Listen, a godsong is in the bees. Each seed is a portal the shape of your before and after.
Invariably, the sun invades: there’s cause and effect and there’s a simple lusting real ludicrous idea that there is only one ideal way to be which we should all strive for.
They say each poem’s an engine w/ an animal heart. Wholed by a light at the snuff of your day, autistic. Please love poets we are the first who do not yield to their authority.
What is the meaning of a mountain of masks? Any other face is fed to the waves that brought you.
This poem is made of lines borrowed from (in order of appearance): Jane Shi, J.D. Harlock, Jaia Hamid Bashir, Shel Moring, DJ Savarese, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Adam Wolfond, Troels Steenholdt Heiredal, torrin a. greathouse, Cyrée Jarelle Johnson, Hannah Emerson, Tiezst Taylor, Lauren Russell, and Leslie McIntosh.
Derek Yen writes code in the mornings and everything else in the evenings. He keeps returning to ideas of illness, technology, and speculative imagination. His writings have been published in Seventh Wave, Lucky Jefferson, A Velvet Giant, and No, Dear. He shares an apartment in Brooklyn with his partner, their dog, and several houseplants. Find him on Instagram @derekiswriting.
I haven’t written in months / A poet should be a prismatic, faceted chrysalis Cabochon sentiment is vulgar, unpublishable “No more breakup poetry, please” Say the glittering butterflies / And so
I haven’t written in months The political climate leaves me speechless I want to hurl breakup poems-slash-javelins at the politicians who revile me / And pin their wings for once / Help me I’m trapped in a bruising marriage with this red-handed Nation / I can’t leave Him He beats me into silence I play the piano when He’s out at the bars He hates my music / I have no money
I haven’t written in months I miss hearing birdsinging outside my bedroom at 4am in summer darkness / Open-windowed five years ago in the old port / Watermuzak Before I entered my husband’s manse, forests on every street / Maples / Dogwoods Rivers of pollen in the gutters / Pure white In this silence, I dream I slay the dragon But nobody wants poems of weary nights They want Baccarat genius, Hermès velvet
God shrive me / I haven’t written in months Pentimento of sin waketh me compline to lauds Hard to wake from my grief to pen iridescence when I’m faced with losing my Social Security and Civil Security / and Whatnot / I grow scutes I’ve stopped waiting to be granted Mercy by anyone who meets me / God shrive my mayfly- self / I have that kind of personality I guess Save the jet’s passengers / rob their purses My mistake for thinking God would grant Mercy like a hydrant spraying in August city swelter
Below these wings / I went to a model train fair My mother drove me / How nice of her She thinks her horned, decrepit politicians would save us from their kindred / if only they held a Supermajority I can’t convince her otherwise / I fear her Look at all the little trains run and run around in their same old tracks without an exit just like our lives
Sean Eaton is a gay, autistic poet from New England, USA. Past publication credits include Hawaii Pacific Review, The Queens Review, and About Place Journal.
Winter 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.
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