Hirshfield’s Nine Gates on the train
back from Toronto. Anand’s Parasitic Oscillations.
I peel apart the air, looking somewhere for something
that might resemble understanding of a language
that is not mine, though we all read and write in English.
I do not speak science. Nor, as it happens, spiritual.
I do not speak if I can help it
unless a voice comes tumbling out of my body like a bird’s.
On the drive back from the station,
I stomp on the brakes for a leaf crossing the road.
I’ve mistaken it for a mouse.
The car behind me honks.
What do you think I should have done?

I am a child, and the hermit crab hangs
from my lip like a clothespin.
I am screaming
quietly as I can, crying too.
I do not want to hurt her.
I do not yank her by the shell.
I do not ask my parents for help.
I do not think they will be so gentle.
I simply wait for her to let go. Which she does, after a while.
It is the last time I kiss a hermit crab.

Later in that same room, a closet door falls on me,
makes of it a doorless closet
from which will come the ttittittittittitt
of my mice once again escaped from their enclosure.
I worry my sister’s cat will find them before I do.
Speaking of closets, of cats, I take to keeping
my tadpoles in a bowl on the wire shelves
where they are out of sight, slightly harder to reach
for Bill, who was raised half-feral in a barn
until we moved him to the suburbs of Chicago.
He has eaten half of two of my tadpoles already,
left their bodies on the carpet in the hall.
In the hall, where at night my mother puts my stuffed animals
one-by-one, one taken every time I get out of bed.
Each time I cry. Each time I get out of bed for comfort
‘til none of my animals are left.
The walls are lined with butterflies.

My hands remember what they remember—
namely, holding my hermit crab up to my face.
Namely, hugging my tadpole.
He wriggled from my fingers. Frenzy
as I scooped him from the floor, plop into the bowl.
He was wet and soft and a little bumpy. Like gums, but cold.
Bill, speaking of gums, would soon eat half of him too.
Speaking of eating, of tadpoles: Abby,
do you remember Mom feeding our tadpoles mouse food?
Blocks of alfalfa floating, she imagined, as a slow-release capsule
to sustain them while we vacationed.
When we came home, yours was a skeleton.
Mine was hanging on by a breath, the little survivor.
I was so proud and relieved I wanted to scoop him from the water,
to hug him against my chest.
You know what happens next, next.

I do not speak science.
Unless, that is, it counts as science when I speak
about the personhood of mice.
Their dexterous thumbless paws and skittish behavior;
how quickly they multiply, five to ten pups in a litter;
how small the pups, so slight they can sit on the trip plate
in a catch-and-release and eat a full meal without consequence.
I watch it happen, them sitting there licking
their bellies full of peanut butter with the trapdoor wide open.
Does a mouse grieve when her pups are taken? 
Just in case, I release them all under the same bench in the woods.

Science says autism
is the underpruning of synapses.
Brains grown in the backyard of an artist
who can’t be bothered with it.
When my backyard was not bothered with,
my dog started pooping on the porch.
Science says this is a metaphor.
Science says the social idiosyncrasies of the autistic mind
can be fixed. Or at least they were fixed in mice, apparently
autistic mice, all given wicked immunosuppressants
not recommended for human consumption. Alas!
science says. For which of us wouldn’t benefit
from a little brain topiary?

Autistic tenderness. Autistic absurdity. Autistic emotion.
Dissent is a feeling. Autistic fascination. Autistic language.
In the silence, the voice of the pines, the murmur
of their interconnection, the synesthetic reverberance,
the generosity of them. Those ancient autistic icons!
Thank you is a feeling. Autistic yes.

At the Brookfield Zoo I made eye contact for the better part
of an hour with an orangutan.
I cannot tell you what she told me as we spoke
because there were no words. But she told me.
I said to my son, this is your cousin.
A nearby woman said to her son, it’s looking right at you!
But she was looking at me. I know this for certain
because I had to break our gaze 
to roll my eyes. The orangutan, I knew,
understood in that funny way cousins do.

My grandma once had a mouse problem.
She knew it was a problem when she slipped on a cardigan
and found a dead one in the pocket.
I knew it was a problem when she called it a problem,
the same woman who left cat food on the back porch
for the raccoon named Evelyn and her many kits.
The same woman who saw a leaf floating in the pool
and ran out to help.
She’d mistaken it for a mouse.
When my grandfather died from the cancer in his marrow,
I wrote her card. It said Dear Grandma,
If you want to come stay at our house, you can have my room.
There are butterflies on the wall.

Autistic kinship. Autistic kindship. Autistic kisses.
I learned my lesson. Autistic trying. Autistic us. Autistic I
can’t help but say what I mean. Autistic language. In the silence, 
orangutans, butterflies, decapod crustaceans, mouse pups eating
blueberries, which are recommended for human consumption.
Autistic reach and pluck a plump whole world from the branch.
Thank you is a feeling. Autistic wow.