& subtitled synesthesia means words tickertape on by in my mind as any words are spoken. A visual lithosphere in my aurora. & maybe I could have been a spelling bee champion & I’d rather champion the underdogs of my life into their own poetries. Sometimes autistics read by holding. & sometimes we are roped into sum times & there is no summing up the sky in our avenues of rebellion. & in the clinic the words repeat: “his movements were not characteristic of a real boy.” & over one hundred years apart they did say this of the feral child of Aveyron & of the gay children twirling their curls, refusing to rough-house. We tire of trying to be real. & we fantasy into tails & retractable fins, third hands for reaching for the collars of lovers. & I am happiest when I am a little bit feral. Dirt on my face & my feet. A happiness of grime between the leaves & leavings. & loving loves. My hair a wild & lanky animal of its own tonguing the breeze. Skin vibrating high at twilight frequencies of summer heat. Crouching low to meet the under. & the subtitle tickertape studies & stutters brightly, whimsical & whim: we we we we we.
heidi andrea restrepo rhodes is a queer, non-binary, crip/disabled, brown, writer, artist, scholar, educator, cultural worker and creature of the Colombian diaspora. They are author of The Inheritance of Haunting, Ephemeral, Afterlives of Discovery: Speculative Geographies in the Settler Colonial Imaginary, Wayward Creatures, and the forthcoming Ampersand Organ: a more-than-human lyric. They are a professor of feminist, queer, and disability studies; poetry co-editor at Apogee Journal. Their poetry and creative non-fiction have been published in American Poetry Review, The Normal School, Michigan Quarterly Review, Alocasia, Poetry, and Waxwing, among other places. They live in southern California.
