Synesthesia

By Tierney Nevermann, 17, Wisconsin

The scent of smoke burns my skin. 

All I can smell are the flames burning before me. 

I hear the bright orange cries of the fire alarm piercing the room. 

Embers dance while shooting through the air. 

All of my senses vanish like the ringing in my head. 

Until the scent of smoke burns my skin once again.

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I’m learning about synesthesia in my Creative Writing class. Synesthesia is when your brain routes sensory information through multiple unrelated senses, causing you to experience more than one sense simultaneously. When writing this poem, I thought about all of your senses’ reactions to a fire. What you see, smell, feel. I thought of a scene in Grey’s Anatomy where there is a fire in the hospital. I thought about how the characters looked and reacted. Once I imagined the fire, synesthesia came more naturally and I was able to write about it. 

Photo by Chris Karidis