“stay sucking on my tongue which is a problem this very moment cuz of a canker sore on the roof of my mouth. the foam earplugs are a similar color to my earwax just less toasty. half-dreaming about the plane doing circles and halfnightmaring three separate planes nosediving. this my mandatory time to thinkaboutdyin. underneath us the scenery is flat and carved into squares like lemon bars.”
-marcus scott williams
“I feel an invisibility / like a neutron in a cloud chamber buried in a mile-long / accelerator, where what cannot / be seen is inferred by what the visible / does.”
-Sharon Olds
“The sun is wide, like an eye cut open,
and it blasts the man
so that his whole shadow
scuttles beneath his belly.”
-Max Ritvo
“Sunrise was heating the ring of the horizon
and clouds were rising like leaves.”
-Derek Walcott
“Here is Henry outside of Ezeiza:
rangy, wry, smile like a clay pot
lovingly repaired and Spanish fly
in the pocket of his summer-weight suit.”
-Conor Bracken
“Only the animals are seasoned owners.
The lakes belong to frogs with broken voices.
Farms are inhabited by rabbits.
A fox barks like a landlord down the dark.”
-Alastair Reid
“Only two women in my family have poisoned their husbands. The rest curl in on themselves like dried pig ears, fish-hooked spines, walking question marks asking Is it safe here?”
-Lauren Albin
“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
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
“The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries
home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like
dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this. He took one
of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water
glass. It came alive there. I am tired of fooling around he said.”
-Carolyn Forché
The Simile Museum 