How Metaphor Works
- How Metaphor Works
Bits of food on the floor represent abundance and decay The removal of a lens cap is history and memory loss Weedy lawn means rain’s exuberance and the absence of love Sexual desire is an uncapped marker and an overturned bucket The tear in her skin means sugar The tear in her skin means the Industrial Revolution Is a page of the Koran and a bit of food on the floor A sleepless night is a hard commute and a broken zipper News of a bombing and a locked museum Are blood in an infant’s veins Excess is a streaming ribbon or a streaming ribbon a song A distant cloud is the perfection of the present and a mark of inattention The end of the honey is one’s mother’s death and one’s mother
The plagiarist is a dish of cherry seeds
A boy’s curved shoulder, a twelve-foot crater Where once was a town center A bottle of water is order in the capital and the ambitions of an art student Ink is my face and is a sleepless night A streaming ribbon is the end of the honey A distant cloud a lens cap removed
A torn bucket is a bit of food on the floor of her thought [End Page 126]
Julie Carr’s books are Mead: An Epithalamion and Equivocal, out from Alice James Books this year. Recent work appears in Verse, New American Writing, Parthenon West, Colorado Review, and Denver Quarterly and in the anthologies Not for Mothers Only (Fence Books) and Best American Poetry 2007. With Tim Roberts she is the coeditor of Counterpath Press. She teaches poetry and literature at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and lives in Denver.
