My Autistic Sister Decides to Take the Bus Home
After Mark Doty‘s “Brian Age Seven”
Mom drives us home from school,
but today Alana gets on the yellow bus.
She tells no one of her plan.
Or maybe she mumbles it to her fingers,
folds it into the lists she keeps
in wobbly crayon strokes.
We ride all over town,
scan silhouettes of strangers.
My little sister presses her hands
to the window-glass,
face wide to the street,
round and available.
Mom answers the phone call.
A bewildered bus driver apologizes.
He completed his route, but Alana remains.
With every stop she had insisted,
“No. This house is the wrong color.”
We exhale when she descends.
That big curve of a smile
reaches nearly to the rim of her face.
I imagine the world she sees.
Brushstrokes I am blind to.
Kate MacLauchlan is completing her MFA with Manhattanville College. Her poems examine the speaker’s family dynamics and place of origin.
The Marbled Sigh 