“The little wooden door that has wedged shut the dark for so long opens with a sigh and lets out a breath of mold and dampness, like books that have been left out in the rain.”
-Sandra Cisneros
The Simile Museum
January 17, 2016
“I heard a Fly buzz – when I died –
The Stillness in the Room
Was like the Stillness in the Air –
Between the Heaves of Storm -”
-Emily Dickinson
January 12, 2016
“The image of Remedios the magistrate’s younger daughter, who, because of her age, could have been his daughter, kept paining him in some part of his body. It was a physical sensation that almost bothered him when he walked, like a pebble in his shoe.”
–Gabriel García Márquez
January 5, 2016
“I hated you because living with you was like living with a microwave: you never talked, sometimes you made me food, and you always sat in the same room, blinking, spinning that plate in your head.”
-Matthew Baker
January 1, 2016
“Well why did you come over. I invited you to my home. He looked me straight in the face. We paused for a moment like animals who hear a loud bang. I’ll let you out, he said.”
-Eileen Myles
December 28, 2015
“Wet furry fields lay like the stomachs of soft animals bared to the sky.”
-Julia O’Faolain
December 19, 2015
“Like people, Miss Stein’s lines are comforting or annoying or brilliant or tedious. Like people, they sometimes make no sense and sometimes make perfect sense; or they stop short in the middle of a sentence and wander away, leaving us alone for awhile in the physical world, that collection of thoughts, flowers, weather, and proper names. And, just as with people, there is no real escape from them: one feels that if one were to close the book one would shortly re-encounter the Stanzas in life, under another guise.”
-John Ashbury
December 16, 2015
“And Mother, startled, shook
out a dress with big peonies splashed like dirt
across the front, as if she had fallen
chasing after me in the rain.”
– Susan Mitchell
December 8, 2015
“… where other children ran about in the glades and pressed their naked bellies, though sheltered from the moon, against the trunks of beeches and oaks that were as sturdy as adult mountaineers whose short thighs bulged beneath their buckskin breeches, at a spot stripped of its bark, in such a way as to receive on the tender skin of their little white bellies the discharge of sap in the spring…”
-Jean Genet
December 1, 2015
“Four days stretched out like the creation of toffee.”
-Elizabeth George
The Simile Museum 