Neurodivergent Memories
(listen to the poem, read by the author)
Age four: fine gray mesh of bedroom screen
receding invisibly when I focused
on Mr. Morelli scolding his wiener dog
mesh / man, mesh / man—for suspended hours
Age five: tempered glass lip of Nonno’s thermos
receiving coffee from an aluminum snout
darkness into darkness, liquid into solid
although glass was moving, creeping very slowly
Age six: watching ants enter brown-sugar holes
knowing from a magazine of their world below
secret rooms no other tribe could enter
brain with group thoughts tunneled underground
Age seven: reading in the crook created
by forsythia bent against white clapboard
light like golden syrup pouring onto the page
black magic of words seeping ever inward
Age eight: rearranging my compliant treasures
on steps to an unused attic crawlspace
Easter candy I hoarded until it turned stale
for the symmetry of a woven basket
Age nine: lecturing those rows of trinkets
they the Massachusetts State Legislature
and I Dorothea Dix, stern and indignant
at the torture of that state’s insane people
Age ten: reading my father’s college Shakespeare
memorizing lines with soaring inky masts
the multitudinous seas incarnadine
stimming to a bloody ocean’s rise and fall
These were years of innocence and experience
Back to Top of Page | Back to Poetry | Back to Volume 18, Issue 1 – Summer 2024
Olentangy
(listen to the poem, read by the author)
It was our last walk, there by the frozen river,
sleepy hollow a few miles from the college.
I’d forgotten the rhythm of being with someone
legally blind—no longer sensitive to how close
you had to be to see where I was pointing,
what I insisted on reading out loud. I recall
your head with its half-glazed eyes turning away
when I bent to examine the headstones of children
dead more than a hundred years, white marble lambs
become black sheep. You didn’t want to kneel on icy
shards of grass to decipher their pitiful ages
or to trace MY DARLING chiseled in spindly script
on one grave, almost an afterthought to sorrow.
You fumed when I ran ahead of you on the footbridge,
stamping my feet. Itched when I insisted on naming
each bird pictured on a creaking tin placard,
sensing that when they fledged we wouldn’t be speaking.
The frosty display that even in my noisy
misery I found enchanting was to you a blur.
I gave you my hand only to climb the shortcut
up a breathless hill. Everything—then—became still.
Back to Top of Page | Back to Poetry | Back to Volume 18, Issue 1 – Summer 2024
About the Author
Angele Ellis is an Autistic and Mad writer who is surprised every morning to find herself an elder. She is author of Arab on Radar (Six Gallery Press), whose poems on her Arab American heritage earned a fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts; Spared (A Main Street Rag Editor’s Choice Chapbook); Under the Kaufmann’s Clock (Six Gallery), a poetry/fiction hybrid inspired by her adopted city of Pittsburgh, and is co-author of the curriculum Dealing With Differences (Corwin Press).