In the Permanent Collection

Careless Simile

11 CARELESS SIMILE After the ice storm, glitter covers the asphalt roadways. When I hear someone say it’s “like a war zone down to the south,” I can’t believe it because death does not descend here as a stern angel with bruised eyes, strong-tendoned wings that pass over audible screams. He comes to eat us slowly from inside, crunches our trucks together in the deep night, with no one awake to hear. I read that after one of the West Side Boys offered a choice of hands to a gasping woman, he brought the machete down across both wrists. And while a photographer sharpened his focus on the ends of her abbreviated arms, the refugee children took turns trying her plastic prostheses then abandoned them to the ground. If this landscape is torn apart, the limbs of the trees severed and thrown down, it’s the weather that determines to engage us in guerilla war, and our tenuous quiet made of clichés hardens in the glaring indivisible ice. ...