I’m “Fucking Stupid,” He Says or Something About the Similarities Between Human and Zebrafish Hearts

I don’t know what the words mean.
I mean, I don’t know
“peacemaker,” “pacemaker”
in the context of what the research proclaims
about a zebrafish heart, “a two-layer
localized peacemaking/control system,
a nodal pacemaker.” What does it mean?
The words? The study of vertebrate hearts?
My vertebrate heart: dum-da-duh,
dum-da-duh, dum-da-duh. We have
similar intracardiac nervous systems, it claims,
the zebrafish and I;
but no, I am no more fish than zebra,
no more gospel than disinformation.
No more what is written on paper to label
my difference: diagnosis, disability.
I wish to repeat the results of the test
that I took to be placed on “a spectrum,”
the high IQ it named.
I want to be pretentious.
I long to be so to his face—my ex, I mean.
In a text, he has called me “fucking stupid” again.
Fool, I’d like to say,
scientists perceive I am drowning in logic
the moment I discern this as murder.
My heart has a brain taking on water.
My heart has two kissy lips.




Note: Research found in “Decoding the molecular, cellular, and functional heterogeneity of zebrafish intracardiac nervous system” by Andrea Pedroni et al. in nature communications.

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Kimberly Ann Priest is a neurodivergent writer and photographer whose book Wolves in Shells won the 2024 Backwaters Prize in Poetry from the University of Nebraska Press. She is the author of tether & lung (Texas Review Press) and Slaughter the One Bird (Sundress Publications). An assistant professor in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and Cultures at Michigan State University, her poetry has appeared in Copper Nickel, Poetry Wales, and Chicago Quarterly Review.