National Autism Poetry Month

April is National Poetry Month. It's also National Autism Awareness Month. Last year, I spent the month of April posting about autism issues that affect our family as well as sharing some of my poetry about raising a child on the autism spectrum. Today I thought I'd share another one of my autism poems with you. This one is from a couple of years ago - I have to get my act together and write some poems about what things are like for us now!

Sensory Profile

i

I could pretend I know

what you’re thinking when

you’re spinning wheels, your eyes

intent on the turning, your body

remarkably still. Or spinning

yourself, never dizzying, eyes

tuned to the whirl of the room. You

are running now, back and forth,

circling, colliding your quick

little body over and over into

my body, or any soft thing.

ii

The way you are immobilized

if I remove your shoes on the lawn.

How you hold out your hands

for me to brush off the sand, every grain

too overwhelming to touch.

How this food is not warm enough,

that one is too slimy, this one

is not a perfect rectangle. You melt

before my eyes, we rock and sing,

rock and sing, rock and sing.

iii

My driver’s window opening is acceptable –

fresh air. Your back window opening

sends you panicking like a trapped bird.

Your eyes widen and tear, you try

to lean away in your car seat. You are quiet,

terrified, eye of a storm about to shift.

But then the streetlamps set your eyes

steady, focused. You center and lean

into their glow, their simple illumination

of what a moment ago we couldn’t see,

what gradually moves into our view.

iv

How you love to cross bridges.

Vibration of the steel under the car, lights

in neat, bright lines, the river beneath

a soft rushing, the bridge lifting us

to safe architecture of air. You love

the ones with perfect angles and x’s.

Those lit like a ladder of stars.

And the kind that were built improbably.

Lowered whole from the sky.

-Brittney Corrigan, copyright 2007. All rights reserved.

As many of you know, Elliot's main interest these days is still elevators. But instead of insisting that we pretend every doorway is an elevator when we move from room to room the way he did a couple of years ago, now he is very creative with his "elevator games," setting up elaborate elevator panels made from numbered blocks and complete with sound effects from his keyboard when the elevator arrives on each floor. He still goes on "elevator adventures" with Papa every weekend, as well. Here he is last weekend having a quiet moment on the Portland Aerial Tram to OHSU (the elevator at OHSU has 14 floors!).


Elliot also loves to draw pictures of elevators and people riding them, as you can see in this picture he drew this morning.


And I'll leave you today with these pictures of the kiddos enjoying the warm, sunny weather we had the last few days (we're back to rain tomorrow, alas!).


Gotta go. I've been instructed by Elliot that it's time to ride the elevator to the first floor!