When I was ten, my dad pot-roasted a cow’s tongue. He brought it to the table on a platter, unsliced, open: a chaise lounge, red and velvet, slip of the lip to swallow us whole. The tongue is a door, a bed of confession, zipper to seal the deal. There is a jade plant on my window sill. Its many tongues sip silent molecules: water vapor, nitrogen, cool pool in the Kalahari. Tongue as cave, as conveyor, as flight of brown bats. Tongue holding space between us, gilded and strong with hope and death - a pocket for everything. Last night a snag of locust blew down over chicken wire. Five hens escaped. The snag, a tongue to freedom, to better pickings, a generous ledge. Sometimes a tongue wags, ungenerous, it keens to ten fingers times twenty dangling over a hand-hewn gunnel. There were children in that boat, fleeing with family over turquoise water. Maybe it was the Mediterranean or cold Aegean Sea - a wide tongue to crac...
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Metaphors
I'm a riddle in nine syllables,
An elephant, a ponderous house,
A melon strolling on two tendrils.
O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!
This loaf's big with its yeasty rising.
Money's new-minted in this fat purse.
I'm a means, a stage, a cow in calf.
I've eaten a bag of green apples,
Boarded the train there's no getting off.
And yours was even SHAPED perfectly!