How to talk about autistic
love beginning with some
imagery stolen directly
from scripture
Her head is a bag of rose petals
Her belief
those same petals
bruised by memory
Her smile is the first two leaves to
emerge
from a seed
Her attention
a field of bolted rocket leaves
Her lonely
a buzzard
Her gaze
a pollen cloud
envied out of a pine tree at dawn
by the wind
Her patience
a disturbed ant’s nest
Her quiet
a long red petiole
holding
the flat fat face of a single sycamore
leaf
Her touch
the tck tck tck
of a lawn sprinkler making light
shows
out of summer heat
caked earth cracking rivers
of drought
sheets of rock
both of us
the moss that fills the gaps
Daniel Cartwright-Chaouki is a gardener and writer from Birmingham, England. He writes about trees and plants (mostly) and people (sometimes) and other unimportant things. His work has featured widely both in print and online including Viridine Literary, Pulp Poets Press, Bodies on Bodies Magazine, Lunar Sea Literary, Fixator Press, Password, The Lake, The Cannon’s Mouth, Coin Operated Press, Sextet, Alocasia and 100subtexts magazine.