Autism
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I.
The electricity in my sister's brain doesn't work right; left
with deviations in gamma and alpha and theta beta
delta,
she spends her days beading jewelry, intricate like
archi
London tec
ture
woodworked
remnants of an empire
that, through water, commanded a world.
Looping plastic cords through tiny holes in plastic orbs,
she commands an empire
at her desk, crafting pulsating
matrix after matrixaftermatrix after matrix,
navigating her
monologue in the sea.
When she was younger, she banged her head against walls.
Neuroscience tells me that maybe there's an explanation in the gamma band—
the crumpled pieces of white paint from the kitchen wall falling,
the rain dance of her coagulation cascade precipitating
tonic
clonic,
contingencyplanning my mother and I in
convergence beneath the telephone, wired, wall-mounted,
silent—all of this
an avalanche excommunicated to a valley by 90 Hz neurillations
onal osc
in the wrong places.
II.
“I made this for you,” she says to me, my
older sister.
III.
The electricity in my brain doesn't work right.
At some coordinate, I am simply a boy suffused in heartbreak, licking
wounds left by a girl, “just like in the movies”; elsewhere,
I serve the Castilian Crown! I am partly Amerigo Vespucci,
by way of the Latin Americus,
charting cortico-cortical seas of
normal
saline!
Petaflops away though,
I am always underneath
a fixed plastic telephone on a white wall, years
ago, with
the slightest impression of my mother on the
other side of me, amidst a
synaptic monsoon.
Footnotes
Listen to Saurabh Sinha read this poem, available on the iPad® and Android™ devices.
- © 2015 American Academy of Neurology
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