Unhinging the "M's" Poem by julia kolchinsky dasbach

Metaphor: compares an apple to a spoon and fork to death and then unlinks them from the sunken contours left on sheets when dinnerware shaped bodies take to air

I burrow down into your pillow
once your head is gone and bury
dreaming under the scent you've left behind

incomparable to silver stirring tea.

Meter: measures just how long is left, forgetting to account for breaking

your lungs are spider webs
and I have lost translucent
count of tear and tether

when one line ends, the next is never certain.

Metonym: chains vultures to light to god to augury out of lexical ligatures

you don't believe you'll live
to see our children grown
and I believe you'll live
but doubt those other lives

a future of metal made un-precious by what has touched it.

Mimeses: imitates at truth, an oak out of an oak out of a smoking valley evergreen, and continues miming, signing, acting out

I forgive you your sickness
forgive the anger lodged
in your stomach like a worm
forgive the desire to cut it out
as though your flesh were apple
and fingers made of knives

once nothing stands but a ghost of what was never there.

Modernism: wishes for return beyond knowing

I'll hold you like a winter leaf
imaging you are not made
of snowfall and rot

that romantic gesture contrived out of the body's certain absence.