Skip to content

Your browser is no longer supported. Please upgrade your browser to improve your experience.

Synaesthesia

Katie Beswick

Synaesthesia by Katie Beswick explores the sensory interplay between physical and digital realms, exploring the ways senses are mediated through different online/offline sensory registers.

Mondays are blue.

Tuesdays red and pitched at g-flat.

Sadness has the aroma of peanuts, toasting.

Snow has the same tugging glare as a foiled balloon.

 

On Facebook, this girl I went to school with memorialises her babies with balloons. 

They merengue their bright skins unleashed against the slick blue.

 

We set out in the wind.

The too much cloying choke of old Basil toasting

on its stem the way it does in summer and when you’re flat

in the deflated balloon days after Christmas: blue

in the metaphorical way 

 

You wait for wind

to blow across the blue.

You mainlined too much internet: this Insta where a woman makes balloon

animals 

And if you could, you’d lay your face against a flat

earth, loosening reality so it becomes a buoyant cartoon

 

That nightmare when Nan turned blue;,

Like breath or wind and you held her as she died

and at the end your love was a toasting.

Back to issue