Kit Kavanagh-Ryan



Skim stone stim rock: Towards a stim poetics

Poetry has always known what neurodivergent readers know in the body. Anaphora, refrain, the rocking of metre, the flick and return of the pantoum: these are the motions a stimming body makes. The hand at the wrist, the rocking at the hips, the phrase said over and over under the breath until it goes soft at the edges. And yet criticism, for the most part, treats repetition as a device. It is catalogued as technique, praised as emphasis, diagnosed as excess when there is too much of it. What it is almost never called is what it so often is: regulation.

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Tell Me Like You Mean It 6

Once, I was sitting in my therapist’s office, and she asked me the question ‘Why do you write poetry?’ It’s a very good question; one with many answers, half of which I couldn’t articulate here. I responded to her with something like, ‘It helps me to understand my internal environment.’

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NDIS Access Request Form 2022

It’s paperwork for dinner. An exercise list on the fridge settles next to the electricity bill, by postcards with cracks in their corners. I need to buy vegetables. Wires settle. Knee and wrist, my body heavy next to the electricity …

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Words and Spills: Disability, Sexuality and Cripping Your Poetry

Writing while crip is complicated.

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Kitchen Prep

I have done this before hours pull and twist while splitting seconds bleed.  (eat your damn food. you’ll be hungry later) garlic sticks to skin hours pull and twist while bleeding seconds split as water follows my spine, bent down. “This …

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Mirrors

Ink blooms in skin intent sketched down in blue. my blood presses up against the nib.  fingers (his) brace  breast and knee and thigh (mine). He checks left and right on his hands. “I don’t want to get it wrong!” …

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Wordspill

F-sharp in my mouth bright and shaped to laughter as I stretch lazysweet and safer in my skin now I know you (you know, you— —touch, if you want.  I am vain when I know you look at me.) I tell …

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Left Song

She smiled glass through sunshine, which steals and swallows until Pain like | hot wires coil I stretch, unspooling, fingers long empty space. Hollow as your throat laughter licks up into small spaces words have left song echoes or unprotected …

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