111. Red Sounds Like A Leaf Falling to the Floor – Cara Zimmer
It’s a radical act of the imagination that allows the reader to wander beyond the borders of our normal, sometimes narrow experience of the world.
Synesthesia, as a literary device, involves the deliberate confusion of the senses. I often tell my creative writing students to imagine that the wires connecting their sense organs to their brains have been cut, jumbled up, and rerouted, so that we write about the sound of a color, or the way a smell feels on our skin. It’s a radical act of the imagination that allows the reader to wander beyond the borders of our normal, sometimes narrow experience of the world. It defies the laws of physics, and in doing so, creates something quite real and true.
I’ve taught synesthesia to all kinds of students—bilingual fourth graders in Austin, high school seniors in New York City. We sometimes write what I call Color Poems: they choose a color, then describe its sound, smell, taste, and feel. Often I combine their most wonderful lines into a collaborative class poem. Just a few of my favorites (it’s so hard to choose!) from the fourth graders at Pérez Elementary School in Austin, with whom I spent the spring of 2012:
Purple feels like October inside a hairy piano.
Silver feels like I’m touching the fear of someone close to me.
Blue smells like a dachshund barking.
Black sounds like deep space that won’t tell a secret.
Green sounds like a dog chasing a caveman, and the caveman’s chasing a cat, and the cat’s chasing a person.
White sounds like paper screaming at us not to write on it.
Violet sounds like drip-drops of water all over the field.
They’re extraordinary—weird, outrageous, profound, revelatory.
The poet Kevin Young has said that “pleasure is a revolutionary act in the face of pain”—it’s a line I cut from a newspaper article and placed on my refrigerator years ago, and I’ve read it again and again since the doors closed on our New York City schools on March 13. A month into quarantine, during what was supposed to be our spring break, teachers at my school offered enrichment workshops to students. While my father was in a hospital in Pittsburgh, I spent a beautiful hour with my beautiful teenagers talking and writing and sharing our work with synesthesia, and at the end, they told me they’d had something that had started feeling rare for them: fun. Me too.
– Cara Zimmer
Prompt:
Choose a color (any color!). Write about the sound, smell, taste and feel of that color.
You can write in lines of poetry or prose. You can focus on one color, or if you’re writing shorter lines and sentences, jump around to different colors.
Bonus prompt:
Choose a sound (maybe a sound that you love, or that you hear all the time, or that you heard once and will never forget). What is the color and shape of that sound? How does the sound smell, taste, feel on your skin?
Allison Fantz
Location: Springfield, VA
About: 2019 college grad living at home with Dad and brother, working from home for a Washington, D.C. criminal justice reform advocacy organization and getting ready to take the LSAT. I wrote poetry when I was a child but stopped when the world taught me that vulnerability was dangerous. I have been on a healing journey this year and writing again has been a big part of that, so I’m grateful to the Isolation Journals for fueling my writing for the past 6 months! I chose yellow for this poem because my temperament leans towards the blues, so it helps me to actively cultivate optimism and surround myself with positivity and light.
Age: 22
Yellow
sounds like wind chimes in a soft breeze
smells like floral perfume and baby powder
tastes like powdered sugar on the buttery crepes Mom used to make for us in the mornings
feels like warm sunlight coming through the window panes to heat your face and light up your eyes in a room with the fan on high.
Now I’m smiling because I’ve written about yellow on a gray day
Andrew Russo
Location: New Jersey
About: Purple was always my favorite color as a kid. It reminded me of fairytales and books and comfort. As I got older I realized I started to think of everything in my past a purple tinge.
Age: 27
Purple is the laughter after your father told you bedtime stories when he was home from a business trip. He’d twist the unfortunate fate of grandma in Little Red Riding Hood into a tale of the dangers of heart burn and not packing the right tools in your basket; how humpty dumpty could fix himself with his Krazy Glue; how the three little pigs actually weren’t so little after all. It is the quiet smile you crack remembering these.
Purple is the weight of the polaroid, heavy between your fingers as you sift through boxes and boxes of unorganized pictures. It is the smell of your grandmother’s perfume trapped in a box with pictures of friends and family you have never met, but a gnawing warmth grows in your chest as you flip through the glossy stacks.
Purple is the first bite of plum, juicy and tart. Plums are always on the periphery – no one seems to go out of their way to eat with joy or purpose, a fruit that you snack on because someone else brought it, but you are not sure who. And though it is gently sweet, and holds back thirst, you want it to be more. The loud explosion of an orange, the crisp crunch of an apple, the burst of sweet juice as you plop another strawberry in your mouth. But all purple is the mellow taste of remembering something better.
Purple is the sweet smell of dew drops clinging to the grass in the early morning. It is the dampness of the fog on your face packing your car for a long journey ahead, eyes itchy with sleep and the lingering scent of damp asphalt, sighing at the relief of the early morning quiet.
Purple is the hazy memory you are grasping at in the back of your head. The name of the man you bought your car from or the hostess who sat you at the restaurant last week, the street of your childhood bully – hazy, shapeless, but on the tip of your tongue. You are sitting with friends, recounting the story of the worst date you have had but, can’t remember what you ate and though the detail is small, its accuracy is vital to the rest of your tale. It is the gnawing feeling of not wanting to forget, but slowly letting the memory fade.
Anonymous
Location: Tucson, AZ
About: I am not a creative writer, however I have greatly enjoyed these prompts and the opportunity to tap into the creative flow. I love color. I love the names associated with all the hues and the way the words roll off my tongue; plum & cerulean, moss & marigold. I am uplifted by color daily, (& we all need uplifting!) so with this prompt, the words flowed happily from my pen.
Age: 59
“Red Sounds Like....”
Of course, it feels warm.
The comforting warmth of sunshine on your face On a brisk winter's day.
Not the sweltering dash-to-the-shade heat
Of an endless Phoenix summer.
And the scent!
Bright
And
Clean!
Like crisp laundered sheets
That you gather up and hold in your arms,
Breathing in deeply,
The aroma.
Then linger in the memory of running past the hanging wash, In September,
Wearing the barefoot calloused feet of summer Playmates from the cul-de-sac in tow.
I can hear it too.
If I close my eyes,
Cup my ear,
And concentrate.
It’s quiet.
A gentle vibration,
A hum.
Like a Monarch alighting on Gregg’s Mist,
Lifting and landing,
Again,
And again,
In slow motion.
The beat of particles moving in space, Quarks, photons, phonons, atoms...... Wings.
It is vital,
And runs through my veins,
And sits just behind my closed eyelids. Nourishing me body and soul.
Like a poem, a juicy red grape, an aria.
I feel the need to sprinkle it around my home In all its wondrous hues,
Kitchen, couch, bath and walls
Or generously stir it into my morning brew. It’s charming and flirtatious.
Canary, corn, bumblebee
It IS a necessity.
It’s the color yellow.
Jacquelyn Howard
Location: California
About: This prompt on Synesthesia sparked my interest as a writer, poet, and storyteller. I think my gift is worthless unless it is shared. I get great delight sharing my thoughts in many venues, including in-person, on-stage, radio, and TV.
Age: 65
Orange tastes like m&m peanuts in your mouth just when the story is getting gooder!
Like when the chocolate melts and the nuts suffer the wrath of my mighty molars and then it rolls into my belly
Orange smells like the sweet aroma of kettle corn calling me into a new day
Shouting get up, there’s things to do and fun to have…merry mischief to conjure up. Be quick!
Orange sticks to my face like the wrinkles, frozen around the freckles that make up my smile
Reminding me of long past skinned knees, bicycles, and learning to tie bows, then knots in my shoes to go roller-skating.
Orange sounds like the roar of a new season, daring the universe to jump to attention
It fills the air with a whirling giggle, signaling all the inhabitants to plug in and come play
Orange reverberates into the crevices, bellowing with laughter
It seasons the springs, peppers the summers, roasts the falls, and savors the winters with fuzzy blankets and cozy hugs.
Orange wraps you up, holds you tight, tickles you imagination, and creates your mojo!
Julia Haney
Location: Cambridge, MA
About: Cara Zimmer's synesthesia prompt made me consider how reconfiguring senses can illuminate, but also how the same technique can be applied to memory -- I'm interested in breaking about and remaking memories, loved one's memories, or stories I've read or heard or dreamed to create something different. In this poem, yellow is cracking open what exists and remaking it into something new.
Age: 27
yellow is how we lock in warmth and still pierce through.
candyland splinters and we find each other again.
it is the paper products aisle at the supermarket
fluorescent hours loosening, the way the edges of a soup bowl cool.
it is wading through marshland to find something new,
and eyes narrowing, and the way a person can ripple across your skin.
yellow is fantasy and proves that nobody can stop
lichen or starfish spreading across the rocks like star dust.
it is clarifying, tendertelling us what we aren’t ready to hear,
breaking and splicing our little worlds into crumbs that we know how to follow.
yellow is brittle and exacting and clean and always points to the undoing.
Mary Korch
Location: Colorado
About: The color green is and always has been my favorite because, to me, it means life.
Age: 70
Spring green, a vision of hope in the early sprouting leaf buds
Sea green, seaweed eternally clean and innocent, fresh and salty
Fern green, the fern's frond unfurls a gesture, like a conductor whose music will now be paused (Ted Hughes, British poet)
Green tea gives us stillness and quiet, peace and meditation
Emerald green, light and bright, full of richness and promise
Forest green evokes open, welcoming warmth, inescapable mystery and a sense of wonder
Laurel green, victory and honor, triumph in righteousness
Ryan Chepita
Location: Ottawa, ON, Canada
About: I have enjoyed this community of talented writers, some of whom have become good friends, since April. This personal entry is a personification of blue. I hope you get something out of it, no matter how you interpret it.
Age: 42
Blue, True to Herself (in exactly 100 words)
I shock like embers in winter from a fire you’d assumed was long dead. My taste, cool and sharp, renders you numb.
I smell like an electrical fire, prompting you to frantically check the outlets. Are you going crazy?
I sound like pristine minor chords within a soothing ballad, but the war in your head twists me into feedback from an out-of-tune electric violin.
But for all my gusto, sadness occasionally overtakes me, and I run to my cool, shadowy refuge.
I know I’ve hurt you, yet you keep returning. That’s our deal.
Yes, I may be difficult, but I’m incomparable.