← Home About Now Photos Library Archive Letterboxd Also on Micro.blog
  • A Color Alphabet

    Bernadette Sheridan developed a synesthesia visualizer that colors words—specifically names —based on the colors she perceives for each letter of the English Alphabet.

    Color your own name here.

    Read more about grapheme and color synesthesia here.

    → 2:49 PM, May 20
  • Sound of Sunlight

    From Futility Closet:

    Alexander Graham Bell believed that his greatest achievement was the photophone, a device that could transmit speech on a beam of light. The speaker’s voice would strike the back of a mirror, modulating a reflected ray. When the ray reached the receiver the process was reversed, producing sound waves.

    “I have heard articulate speech by sunlight!” Bell wrote to his father in 1880. “I have heard a ray of the sun laugh and cough and sing! … I have been able to hear a shadow and I have even perceived by ear the passage of a cloud across the sun’s disk. You are the grandfather of the Photophone and I want to share my delight at my success.”

    That idea interested me to the point that I had to shake some of the imagined, unscientific particulars out of my head. Consequently, a poem fell out:

    Laundry Day

    In the sun’s setting shaft, lighted
    dust and my mother’s voice I hear. My living
    room full of it, which is skin, and it smells like soot
    sweat, burned-out in glowing effigy. I fold. Her
    voice: minivan ArmorAll and Twizzlers tasted
    with Dolly Parton. Her Voice: heard over yellow
    linoleum in the kitchen, greased black and scuffed. So
    also, here and now it travels, as it did with car, dinner
    steam, and curled plastic floor, she rolls into my ear
    marbles into a black velvet bag, kept with a cinch. Leapt on
    the sun stream while skating on the black
    frozen pond of space’s pool, she phoned
    me with light. The light and she
    spoke in harmony; thus
    they traveled well. Diamond-taught dance she
    rasps from smoky lungs. Voice plods with camel
    strength, breathed at speed, leaping
    particles like lily pads
    in order to sound, four
    simple words, we know them well. “I love you, child,
    so I’ll tell you what I just heard her
    say, “Put away your socks.” Her
    voice: A moth with lighting for wings
    thundered thru the deep, one arc at a time.

    → 2:27 PM, May 14
  • RSS
  • JSON Feed
  • Micro.blog

© 2022 Poetics of Prayer