Challenge from Jennifer Jowett:  Write a poem intertwining color and Syntesthesia – igniting sensory pathways in the brain that mix up the senses (what does smell taste like? what texture is color?).

Polished Tarnish

glittery flickers and glimmers
of 1970s festivities, memories
of Miriam’s simmering skillets,
scents of Christmas dinner deliciousness,
mothering me: metallic fillings
of bitten aluminum foil, agitating
through the roof tooth nerves!
bidding forgiveness, then
tinkly and ringly tintinnabulation
such merriment foretells
of silvery and harmonistic bells, bells, bells

shimmer disappears, silver tarnishes

constipated cumulonimbus thunderheads –
threatening vistas, tinting windows
of diminished consciousness, disturbing
my mother’s pallor as she
relinquished this world –
the glitzy glamour girl
of the 1950s,
spirit withering,
dimming, sinking in 2016, sprinting
into the swirling, twirling,
Starry, Starry Night

re-enter the shimmer

visions of her inspiration
silly mirages?
optic illusions?
mistaken apparitions?
NO. miraculocirrus Miriam –
audible, visible, omniscient,
present!

-Kim Johnson