By Jonathan Greenhause
Like snow, like bicycles, like ravioli.
The sense of it’s like rubbing alcohol on the tip of your tongue.
It’s like a circus performing in your closet.
If you cut a hole in your brain, this is what you’ll see.
Like a dog discovering it can fly.
Like an icicle.
It’s a thousand oranges becoming sentient beings.
It’s a shoe that has no knowledge of feet.
Like a nation with no people.
Like a germ learning to be beneficial, beneficent.
It’s a herd of elephants trying its trunks at poker.
Like a sunset in the dark of night.
Like a mourning dove in mourning.
What a king must feel when he abdicates.
The speed at which a snail changes its shell.
Like a seagull fearful of the rain.
Like a group of similes strung together in no discernible order
or a poem lasting roughly a page & desperately searching for a theme
tying its separate parts together.
Like strawberry jam.
It’s people forgetting their own names
& it’s words turning into something larger than themselves.
It’s the end of a long war that should never have been fought.
Like an invasion magically undone.
Like who we used to be.
Like joy.
This is published with permission.
"Like" first appeared in Slipstream.
"Like" first appeared in Slipstream.
