The Simile Museum

Category: Uncategorized

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“the prophets are alive but unrecognizable to us
as calligraphy to a mouse”

-Kaveh Akbar

“The girl’s face was as tight and mean as broccoli.”

-Toni Morrison

“Trivial as a parrot’s prate.”

-William Cowper

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“Valerian Street was mindful of their criticism, but completely indifferent to it. His grey eyes drifted over the face of such guests like a four o’clock shadow on its way to twilight.”

-Toni Morrison

“Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.”

-Virginia Woolf

“It’s her birthday, so I smile

but I can’t stop the images

in my own untreated head

— dendrites sprouting threads

like untended ivy, brewing

storms of dopamine and serotonin,

everything out of kilter, ready

to blow.”

-Lauren K. Alleyne

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“She wore her body like a mistake she hoped to one day be forgiven for.”

-Naomi Jackson

The roads unroll like receipts — connecting

shopping cluster to subdivision,

the valley floor thickening with concrete

and plots of unnatural green—and run on,

unconcluded, in lines that buckle with heat.

– Claire McQuerry

“It would be wonderful to be young in this day and age. So many obstacles cleared from the path. Like driving right behind the snowplow.”

-Kate Eodor

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“An important memory is like a gravitational field–the mind is compelled to return to it again and again. It is like a moon; it lives in light and shadow.”

-Rikki Ducornet