Cynthia A. DiTaranto, from Volume 4:2

Cynthia A. DiTaranto has self-published two color-illustrated children’s books. She has been published in Narrative Northeast Literary and Arts Review, Goldfinch Literary Review, and various goat journals. She is a member of NJ’s Women Who Write and a former volunteer at her local women’s battered shelter.

DiTaranto had her poem "The Synesthete" published in the latest volume. Below is an excerpt:

If he could hear colors,
Smell, taste and touch sounds….
His music would rival the greats.

Eyes closed; senses alert.
His earbuds piped in Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata.
Vibrations sent to Ernest’s brain.

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Read DiTaranto's remarkable poem in full on page 57 of Synesthesia Literary Journal Volume 4:2 today!

Jon Wesick, from Volume 4:2

Jon Wesick is the host of the Gelato Poetry Series, author of the poetry collection Words of Power, Dances of Freedom, and an editor of the San Diego Poetry Annual. Wesick has published over three hundred poems in journals such as the Atlanta Review, Pearl, and Slipstream. He has also published nearly a hundred short stories. One was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. One of his poems won second place in the 2007 African American Writers and Artists contest. Another had a link on the Car Talk website. Jon has a Ph.D. in physics and is a longtime student of Buddhism and the martial arts.

Wesick's poem "Bookstore by the Tea Shop," an elegy to the now-defunct Del Mar Book Works, appears on page 56 of latest volume. Below is an excerpt:

The iron laws of economics–
no more browsing before movies,
Henning Mankel,
and Best American Short Stories.
No more
cards with wineglass
and dark triangle of Merlot
between a woman’s thighs.

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Open Synesthesia Literary Journal Volume 4:2 today to read Wesick's poem in its entirety!

Jim Zinaman, from Volume 4:2

Jim Zinaman is a recruiter for finance, accounting, and IT professionals. Previously he was a non-profit development director after twenty years at Goldman Sachs as a hedge fund relationship manager, securities lending trader, and computer programmer. After graduating Yale, he hitchhiked around the United States, working as a carpenter and a restaurant cook and waiter, and joined and later helped deprogram members from a cult. Jim is married with three grown children and lives north of New York City. He has published three short stories to date.

Zinaman contributed his short story "Heading to Hot Springs" to the latest volume of Synesthesia. Below is an excerpt:

     Charlie headed out toward Arkansas and gave voice to what he had been humming. Indeed it was early Beatles and Stones in the emulation of their favorite American rockers: “Rock ’n Roll Music”; “It’s All Over Now.”
     Will heard Charlie’s singing as another version, another wave in that Southern tide of talking. The kind of word flow he had shared with those whom too many in New York would deem white trash in Florida, but who had given him food and shelter during his migrations this past year when he had nowhere else to turn. He had hoed crops with these people, slaughtered pigs, and prepared and shared meals with them. With them he had lived amid a thickness of human presence, as thick and filling as the deep-fried food. Everything which had once struck him as so overdone in the South—the heat, the deep-fry, the eyeliner and mascara and teased-up bleach-blond hair, the rising inflection as if every sentence ended embroidered as a question—now impressed him as what they really were. A spicing up, an emphasis, and more than that, a request for reaffirmation. Like the verbena, jessamine, and wisteria blaring their colors and scents throughout the countryside or the kudzu vine blanketing more and more forests in an undulating crescendo of green fronds overwhelming green leaves, these people in the South were saying in voice and cosmetics, “Here I am! Amidst this land of profusion, can you see me? Can you hear me?” And the chorus of a response could be heard in every Southerner’s “Yes, sir” or “Yes, ma’am.”

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Turn to page 47 in Synesthesia Literary Journal Volume 4:2 to read Zinaman's tale in full today!

W. F. Lantry, from Volume 4:2

W. F. Lantry’s poetry collections are The Terraced Mountain (Little Red Tree 2015), The Structure of Desire (Little Red Tree 2012), winner of a 2013 Nautilus Award in Poetry, and The Language of Birds (Finishing Line 2011). He received his PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Houston. His honors include the National Hackney Literary Award in Poetry, the Patricia Goedicke Prize, the Crucible Editors' Prize, the Lindberg Foundation International Poetry for Peace Prize (Israel), the Potomac Review Prize, and the Old Red Kimono Prize. His work appears widely online and in print. He currently works in Washington, DC. and is an associate fiction editor at JMWW.

Lantry contributed two poems to the latest volume of Synesthesia, "Self-control" and "Widdershins." The following is an excerpt from the former:

But mostly I must find a cleft and lean

away from the cliff face, moving between
solidity of stone and open air—
the line dividing them hard to define
exactly when the torn sky's darkening
as hollow forms fracture and recombine,
until those clouds, breaking, restore the glare
and we refind our passage overhead.

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Photo by Ellen Cannon (2013)

Navigate to pages 44 and 45 of the newest volume of Synesthesia to read Lantry's inspiring work today!

Indunil Madhusankha, from Volume 4:2

Indunil Madhusankha (B. H. I. Madhusankha) is currently an undergraduate in the Faculty of Science at the University of Colombo. Even though he is academically involved with the subjects of Mathematics and Statistics, he also pursues a successful career in the field of English language and literature as a budding young researcher, reviewer, poet, and content writer. He explores the miscellaneous complications of human existence through his poetry by focusing on the burning issues in contemporary society. Moreover, Indunil’s works have been featured in several international anthologies, magazines, and journals.

Madhusankha's poem "The Lamentation of a Mother" appears on pages 41 and 42 of the latest volume. Below is an excerpt:

We had dreamt of a grand wedding ceremony for you
of sublime calibre
with the accompaniment of music
Yet I heard the smoothing rhythm
of neither the violin nor the piano
only the deafening cacophony of brownish iron horses
that they called a respectable gun salute,
and the lachrymose craws of the participants

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Read Madhusankha's poem in its entirety today in Synesthesia Literary Journal Volume 4:2!

Laura Hulthen Thomas, from Volume 4:2

Laura Hulthen Thomas heads the undergraduate creative writing program at the University of Michigan’s Residential College. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including The Cimarron Review, Epiphany, Nimrod International Journal, Witness, and Novella-T. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and received an honorable mention in the Nimrod Literary Awards. She is a contributor to Ghost Writers: Us Haunting Them, an award-winning collection of stories by noted Michigan authors. Her short fiction collection, States of Motion, is forthcoming from Wayne State University Press in Spring 2017.

Thomas has an excerpt from her short story "Adult Crowding"— from the aforementioned forthcoming short fiction collection, States of Motion —running in the latest volume of Synesthesia. Below is a preview:

      Tammy pulled the turn indicator.  “You ever hold your breath, Mr. Jerrell?”
     “Come again?”
     “When passing a cemetery.”
     “I used to do that.”  Mr. Salisbury fidgeted with his lap belt.
     “I still do.”  Tammy caught her breath the moment the Gold Star fender drew parallel to the town cemetery’s iron fence.  Her slender fingers gripped the steering wheel.  Her knuckles, smooth, fleshy half moons, flashed white.
     “Let’s breathe through the intersection, Tammy,”  Jerrell suggested.  But Tammy held her breath through a roll past the stop sign.  Her cheeks pinked.  Her lips tensed in a pout.  Her thighs flexed under her tight jeans.  Jerrell fastened a stare on the windshield.  No future in noting stimulating changes in a little girl’s physique.  He covered the instructor brake, checked for any cars barrelling through the intersection, blessedly none.  “That’s a rolling stop, Miss.”
     Tammy breathed, a moist whoosh that blended with the air vents’ hum. “Sorry, Mr. Jerrell.”  The glove box rattled over the uneven pavement in front of the Brilliant Ford dealership.  Tammy white-knuckled the center line to avoid the broken asphalt.
     “You can’t observe traffic safely if you don’t bring the vehicle to a full stop.”
     “Especially if you don’t breathe.  Stupid little kid trick,”  Mr. Salisbury muttered.
     Tammy shot him a furious look in the mirror.  “It’s not.  The souls of the dead can ride right inside you on your air.”
     “So, I breathed.  Why don’t I have dead people in me right now?”  Mr. Salisbury said.
     “Who says you don’t?  Didn’t kids ever hold their breath in your day, Mr. Jerrell?”
     Somewhere along the way Jerrell’s youth had become your day to the young people.  “Proceed for a half mile.  No, I never did hold my breath,”  he added when Tammy glanced at him, a brief, sidelong disappointment.  He’d always felt something was dead inside of him, anyway.  And the town cemetery, beautifully manicured, populated by regular funerals and cheery blossom sprays left by the adoring living, was a damn safe sight, in his opinion.  He’d welcome in any dead so well loved.
     “Aren’t you religious?”  Mr. Salisbury piped up.
     Tammy chose to ignore Mr. Salisbury by keeping her gaze firmly on the gentle curve into downtown.  Good call.  “Start slowing down past First Lutheran,”  Jerrell instructed when the familiar gold-tipped spire glided into view.  “The posted limit there is twenty-five.  Take a left at the four corners.”
     “Your mom taught Sunday School, right?”  Mr. Salisbury had decided on a persistence he never brought to bear on mastering his driving skills.
     “So what?”  Tammy flicked him a brief, dismissive glance in the mirror.  Braked mildly at the four corners’ stoplight in the heart of town.  Lucky Drugs and the tavern stood opposite one another on Michigan Avenue.  The home decor shop where Ethel used to buy her Hull Collectibles was long gone.  So was the Kresge.  A bank and an optometrist occupied those storefronts now.  Tammy eased into the left turn lane next to a silver Volvo.  The driver, a real Ozzie Nelson type, glanced doubtfully at the lurid Gold Star decals.  The company mascot, a cartoon car with rubber balloons for wheels and a blubbery grin, filled the passenger door.  Garish funhouse mirror stars splashed the side panel.
     A real circus to announce the student drivers.
     “Left blinker, don’t forget,”  Jerrell reminded Tammy.  She dutifully pulled the turn indicator.
     “So, you believe that souls rise to Heaven.  So, in that case, there wouldn’t be any souls of the dead left on Earth to get inside you.  So, why hold your breath?”
     “Not everyone gets to Heaven, Ace.”  Jerrell couldn’t help defending Tammy’s superstition, harmless and cute.  Just the type of girlish habit that would fill her with youth and hope forever, make her a beautiful and kind woman to love.
     “So we’re talking zombie-souls here.”

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Read Thomas's remarkable piece in Synesthesia Literary Journal Volume 4:2, and look for States of Motion in 2017!

Glen Armstrong, from Volume 4:2

Glen Armstrong holds an MFA in English from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and teaches writing at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. He edits a poetry journal called Cruel Garters and has three recent chapbooks: Set List (Bitchin Kitsch), In Stone, and The Most Awkward Silence of All (both Cruel Garters Press.) His work has appeared in Poetry Northwest, Conduit, and Cloudbank.

Armstrong has two poems running in the latest volume of Synesthesia: "The Call of Cthulhu" and "Beauty Is as Beauty Does." The following is an excerpt from the former:

These are the darkest
nights imaginable,

but nights, darker,
still full of ill-considered
pleasure, wait in a vast beyond

for the chance to uncurl.

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Navigate your way to pages 27 and 28 of Synesthesia Literary Journal 4:2 to read Armstrong's work in full today!