Metaphor. Hotline. Support. Network.

When my sons were babies they only slept if they slept like metaphors. I swaddled them. I wrapped them tight in a soft muslin blanket printed with moons or trees or carrots or bears. I pressed their arms against their sides, tucked them completely in, and only then would they drift. Often in the middle of the night the swaddle would loosen, a tiny hand would come free, and they’d cry until I wrapped them so tight you could barely tell the cloth from their skin. 

It’s been five months since the outbreak. A student attaches an x-ray of her heart to her poem. It sits in her chest, off-kilter. My sons are no longer in school, but in a pod. Instead of going anywhere, I zoom in and I zoom out. The whole planet feels like a gigantic cocoon swaying heavily from the edge of a cliff, but I can’t tell if we are the protective casing that must eventually shed, or the insect inside.  

I want to call up every writer I know and ask, “given the outbreak, how are your metaphors doing?”

The original Greek word «ΜΕΤΑΦΟΡΑΙ» means “transports.” It is embossed on every moving truck in Greece. To metaphor is to move the contents of one house into another.  To metaphor is to move the contents of hope into a pokeberry seed. Or move the contents of love into a rubbed off “A” on a typewriter. Metaphor is a moveable burial plot. It contains, like soil and air, the uncontainable. Metaphor is a ghost turning back into a boy. But what happens to metaphor when the framework as we once knew it thins or even dissolves? When the world seems to be breaking out of the world that once kept it? Do we need a double swaddle? More muslin? Or must the tiny hand come free?

Metaphors reduce distance. But what does this mean in a world where we must stay at least six-feet apart?

When I was a young poet I brought into workshop a poem called “The Father.” It had in it a bridge made of dresses. During the critique, I was told “surrealism is dead.” Ha, ha. Ha? Ha? Little did we know back then that not only was surrealism not dead, but it would soon become our reality. But this is not exactly why I bring up “The Father.” I bring up “The Father” because I learned a very important lesson that day. I learned that if you write a bridge made of dresses, you need to write a world around that bridge that can hold an impossible bridge up. I hadn’t done that. And so, there was just this bridge. Soft and beautiful, but flimsier than a clothesline. And nobody could cross it.

But what if we can no longer tell if the world we are writing from is inside out or outside in? Up above or down below? The future or the past? What if the rules, like clouds, are becoming a rabbit, no an ambulance, no a dragon, no an unraveling spool of thread. What happens to our imagination when the unimaginable has imagined us up first? Is there an emergency hotline for metaphors?

I am struggling to come up with a metaphor for writing metaphors during an outbreak. I line up ten metaphors. They are all covered in cracks that loop like cursive. From their centers—a soft hum. They smell like milk. They have stubble where their beards will never grow. Like a living room in the late afternoon, they grow dimmer and dimmer until night surrounds them. They are not even metaphors. They are drawings of metaphors. They are erased where their names should be.

I find a website called Metaphorai. I click on “Services.” “We provide our customers,” it reads, “the option to get teleported, transformed, or both at once.” I scroll down. “We transform you,” it reads, “into the subject / object of your choice:”

Alien, Ashes, Bear, Boy, Bull, Bush, Butterfly, Diamond, Dolphin, Double, Duke, Fish, Flower, Fly, Forever Young, Frog Giant, Half human, Horse, Insect, Invisible, Island, Locust, Miniature, Mountain, Multiple, Ninja, Pig, Prince, Tree, Smile, Snake, Stone, Superhero, Swan, Tin heart, Vinyl LP, Werewolf, Wolf and more. 

I click, “Book Now.” I fill in my name. First and last. I type in my email address. “Contact us for price estimation. Prices range depending on distance in space and time (for teleportation) and species distance, weight and size (for transformation).” In the comments box, I write: “how much would it cost to be transformed into my grandmother?” I consider writing, “I miss my grandmother.” Or “my grandmother is dead.” Or “her name is Gertrude.” But I don’t. I imagine whoever is in charge understands I wish to wrap myself inside her. If only for an hour. I have not heard back yet, though I imagine soon I will. 

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Editor's Note: 
This post's image of JAM Project's photograph of Will Coles' "Metaphor" was used under the Creative Commons license via Flickr. No changes or alterations were made to the photo.