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“Metaphors are a bad habit,” the professor says.  “We are chefs throwing bacon in bad recipes,” I write in my notes.  “I think in metaphors,” I think.  I’ve read papers on the pedagogical importance of metaphors.  I wrote my senior thesis on the power of metaphors.  It is such a shame Susan Sontag is dead.  Dear Susan, are you turning over in your grave yet?

What is a metaphor?  Or are we talking about all figurative language?  Similes are logically weaker than metaphors, does that make them better or worse?  Then, there is metonymy defying a definition stronger than association.  Synecdoche is a kind of metonymy; the part representing the whole.  Chemistry is the study of synecdoche with respect to any other field.  I think metonymy is the fast lane of thought.  The height of poetry is the wild linking croissants and my imaginary older sister. 

Function follows form is the lesson of the semester, I suspect.  So the problem with metaphors is that they are the converse.  They are meaning heavy.  They are heavy.  This professor likes light language and dark thoughts. What if I resist?  What will this course do to me?  What if no one appreciates this rant? 

I’d rather jump an unfamiliar horse over a fence with my eyes closed than give up my metaphors.  Metaphors equal life for me. 

Her eyes

Are a black,

Black notebook

Filling a five-star five subject

Notebook of the month,

A part of her.

A teenager

Hates her brown eyes

Dirt dark chocolate ice cream.

Her eyes are a blank book.

Blue and light alliterate

Beautifully.

The young

Neurobiologist is poet

Learning the mechanism of sight.

Her eyes are a black Macbook.

Her eyes are a book born

Apart from her.

The first time

My mom told me I was fat

Was freshman year of high school.

She clarified,

I weighed as much as my six-foot-tall father.

She stocked the house with diet cola.

She said, “ten pounds would be easy to lose.” 

Which wasn’t right…

My father was wasting away, a neurodegenerative disease.

My mother baked chocolate chip cookies twice a week

For my father.  After school, I stopped at the supermarket.

Then she said to me, “twenty pounds are doable with a teenage metabolism.”

The doctor prescribed my father chocolate ice cream at every hospital meal.

When I was a senior,

My arm measured the same circumference

As my father’s thighs.  I hate that fat and bulky muscle on my arms. 

What is so smart about lifting dumbbells? 

My father is dead. 

All I can think

When I look at my boyfriend’s nakedness is

That he’s impossibly skinny...  

The hairs on my arm

Raised alarm. 

Ahead are pedophile-like whiskers

And pallid lips.

Ogling while I gulp coffee and read poetry

Is the pervert fish.

Duck, he can’t risk hard evidence, he’s

Been caught before.

His finely tuned sense of smell lets

Him hunt late.

He is a channel cat, Ictalurus punctatus,

Creepy fish.

That old bastard will resurface

Later.

Why am I a mouse?

Fish?

Happy Birthday

Plane tickets, big city, bland lake, me

Will you see me across the Midwest?

Texting from the pilothouse

Fog like milk- your job is lactose intolerant

Fog happens, shit!

You are the novel I haven’t read

By my favorite author.

To William James

Said Gertrude Stein

“What holds the world up?”

“The world rests on the shell of giant turtle.”

“What supports the turtle?”

“The turtle rests on the shell of a larger turtle.”

“What supports the larger turtle?”

“Why it’s turtles all the way down!”

“But it isn’t turtles really…

They are only a vehicle for the metaphor,”

Declared Gertrude Stein.

Its stories all the way down!”

My mother was an island.  She would try to shield me from the worst of her depressions by wrapping me in a thick gray blanket.  We needed a doorbell as loud as a foghorn for me to hear mailman ringing. 

It was a sandy beginning to be sure.  But the trellis made up for it with regular supports and places to play.  There were windows within reach; there was space between the blinds to peak inside. 

I’m a thorny person.  My mother was never angry if I hurt her; she felt that our exchange was source of essential nutrients.  She fed me chocolate ice cream that was dirt dark and gritty. 

She woke me with warmth.  My mother’s salty breath was stronger than a cup of Starbucks coffee.  After a long morning of working, I could nestle into her softness for my late afternoon nap.

…

Everyday

She ventures out

To Brant Point Lighthouse,

Dr. Grobstein brought her up to lighthouse keeping.

Here the storyteller’s problem is the sound;

There the sailor’s problem is the sea.

To see her, an officer ducks

Out on the deck.

Their alchemy

Is tertia non datur.

The third is not given for

Turning base metal into gold.

Her skin tans golden while waiting for him.

She is true, and he only likes true stories.

He learns that Wellington’s are good

For climbing rain slicked boulders,

Other details and facts. 

Every night

He litters his room’s

Floor with facts about her.

The facts are chirping like crickets,

He has an infestation keeping him awake.

Heading to the toilet, he stubs his toe on a fact

He needs a toad.  An anurian she would say,

A story to swallow legs and eyes

And all.