aka
 
The earth is red, a base of perception.
Her words sound like the flow of lava
cooling, deepening to black,
There is a physicality to these words
that spans our language:
the name for soul is a jewel made of red earth.
It is the same for blood, the color of its voice:
rivers in the shapes of people,
chimes accentuating a syllable,
or naming a destination.
Our senses tell us where we are going
as much as where we are.
For the synesthete, there is a commonality
that the color of our senses share
in their linguistic past.
Four and base and death
become the same word, evidenced
by the sameness of their color.
In Jale, there are only two named colors:
black and white, dark and light.
But when we die, it is to the red soil we return.

adalonige
 
Blood is the painting of a native people.
The movement of each brush stroke
warming against the skin.
Compositions of our ancestors,
whose music moves in strange geometries;
of appropriate words, when spoken,
that allow the blind to see.
Lending eyes to music, ears to painting.
There is a language of pain
where all the words are hued with orange.
The letters rustle like leaves,
before falling and blending into earth
along the Nunna dual Tsuny.
A Medicine Woman sings in whispers.
Her name is the taste of citrus.
An Old Mother, leader of her people,
the orange, golden center of a rose
grown from tears.

amarillo

In every language, the word yellow
is the same texture of grain. Amarillo,
town of my birth, is wheat-tinted by the sun.
The color pulls me, like gravity or ancestry,
with abstractness of thought.
Each word, curiosity and sensory among them,
a golden symmetry amongst an emptiness of plains.
Somewhere in this past, a distinction arises
between science and experience
where one becomes conjecture
and the other, evidence of its own objectivity.
These are the genetics of the soul.
Neurons become metaphor for phenomenology. 

grün

The heart is the forest of a single tree,
central green, four points extended,
branching in every direction.
Every leaf speaks with its own voice,
navigating the waters of our veins.
Blood murmurs in translation,
bridging the communication of its parts.
My name comes from the word for peace
joined with that meaning hostage.
There are times when the beauty of sensation
entraps my speech, blinds my tongue,
and the valleys of my flesh fill with seed, acorn, ash.
The branches of my arms become weighted
by the child who climbs to my shoulders.
The tree is melaleuca, a paper skin invasion,
stealing breath as it blooms. 

ao

The child is a sapphire sun 
shining through the leaves.
His name is both memory and ocean,
the longing space between sea and sky.
Memory is a blue word, anchored
by its dominant letter, like mountains
shaping the sea in the push to their height.
And again the lineage of gravity pulls me back
to time before language, purity of form:
shape and sound without explicit meaning,
but not without conception.
For the blind or the deaf, is the world no more imagined
that for the child who does not speak?

lila

There are universal languages, unspoken,
unformed, yet for the color of their sound.
Faith and language are both purple words.
Our language the evidence of what we cannot see,
the perception beyond the sensory,
sound denied by the saturation of sight,
color vanished for its lack of name.
The world becomes a grey place,
colored only by the language of faith,
the metaphor, the prayer.
The bleeding and blending of senses
becomes its own communication. 

holo

In my dreams there are circles,
endless rings filled with white light.
Petals of the Cherokee rose,
curl and spray of ocean foam,
the corona of an eclipsed sun.
Perhaps there is no name
or perhaps it is I who am nameless.
In my alphabet, there is one white letter;
a small and perfect circle.
I abandon my thoughts, let the dream speak:
The Jale word for white is holo.
A dominant O, and the words come.

       ​Open
hOpe
              ​lOve.

Previously published online and in print in Synesthesia Literary Journal