One is plum, and two corroded green,
the colour of copper after rain
oxide-hued and flaking.
I taste the tint when sniffing day-old meat
or daffodils. My child’s cry is cinnamon
but feels like glass, slick and viscous on the tongue.
Her mother smells of sunsets
and breathes tan velvet as she speaks.
The wiring’s wrong,
my brain is sprained.
Stirred senses swap: sound is vision; flavour, touch.
The spectrum sings-
colours swell where I’ve been sworn they’re not,
in numbers, text, that passing scent.
I cut my hand and taste khaki.
It’s all I know,
this overdose of detail.
See hear, touch taste
and smell as interlinked as vertebrae or music.
Such riches dazzle but demand.
Even silence wears me thin:
it sounds pale umber, feels like rain.
Still, better my abundance
than none at all, a view like yours:
sense packaged up,
drab digits and a world gone dark.
The Synaesthete
Kylie Ladd is a novelist and freelance writer. Kylie’s third novel, Into My Arms, was selected as one of Get Reading’s Fifty Books You Can’t Put Down for 2013. She holds a PhD in neuropsychology, and lives in Melbourne, Australia, with her husband and two children.
'Volte-face' by Anna Squires. Born and raised in the Georgia, Anna Squires is currently denying her roots as a Southern belle as she studies in Colorado Springs. Future plans include work in the diplomatic service and time traveling to the 1920s to be a real Surrealist.
by Kylie Ladd