A is a figure of speech involving a comparison between unlike things
using like or as.
“Beautiful as dancers,
gliding over each other like ice-skaters
over the ice, fingers hooked
inside each other's bodies, faces
red as steak, wine, wet as the
children at birth whose mothers are going to
give them away”
—Sharon Olds, from “Sex without Love”
“your pockets turned inside out, hanging breathless as tongues”
—Gary Soto, from “The Morning They Shot Tony Lopez”
“You lay there, fastened to the tracks
and waiting, breathing like a bull,
your fingers lit at the tips like matches.”
—Jay Parini, from “Coal Train”
“The vacuum cleaner sulks in the corner closet,
Its bag limp as a stopped lung”
—Howard Nemerov, from “The Vacuum”
“hair flapping
behind you like a
handkerchief waving
goodbye”
—Linda Pastan, from “To a Daughter Leaving Home”
“the umbrella rotting
like a leaf in a dresser drawer”
—Paul Guest, from “Tuscaloosa”
“Heat and need, like invisible
animals, gnaw at my breast”
—Dorianne Laux, from “This Close”
“Using my heavy metal rake,
I’ll comb pine needles
out of the lawn like tangles
out of wet hair.”
—Shelley Wagner, from “Thirteenth Birthday”
“I kicked off the bottom like a frog,
my limbs doing fearfully strange strokes,
lungs collapsed in a confusion of bubbles,
all air rising back to its element.”
—David Bottoms, from “Under the Boathouse”
“In the lung-ache,
in the loud pulsing of the temples, what gave first
was something in my head, a burst
of colors like the blind see”
—David Bottoms, from “Under the Boathouse”
“A few strands of your dyed red hair
hang nearly to the floor,
as if all your blood had run there to hide.”
—Ai, from “The Mortician’s Twelve-Year-Old Son”
“a commotion of typewriter-keys
Like a chain hauled over a gunwale”
—Richard Wilbur, from “The Writer”
“We watched the sleek, wild, dark
And iridescent creature
Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove
To the hard floor, or the desk-top,
And wait then, humped and bloody,
For the wits to try it again”
—Richard Wilbur, from “The Writer”
“that would certainly
be unpardonable, like a tiger
eating her cubs.”
—Virgil Suárez, from “The Ways of Guilt”
“He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like dried peach halves.”
—Carolyn Forché, from “The Colonel”
“I proceeded like a polar explorer
through clips, clasps, and moorings,
catches, straps, and whalebone stays,
sailing toward the iceberg of her nakedness.”
—Billy Collins, from “Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes”
“Fantasies as well
have lost their edge and settled
like cinders after the fire”
—Susan Berlin, from “Settling”
“Shot in the head, they jump only once, lie still
like dead beer cans.”
—David Bottoms, from “Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump”
“I'll fall
on my side and drum my toes
like a typewriter or squeal
and shit like a new housewife
discovering television”
—Philip Levine, from “Animals are Passing from our Lives”
“whimper
Like animals when the sky goes black”
—Mary B. Campbell, from “Sexual Terrorist”
“At night
deer drift from the dark woods and eat my garden.
They're like enormous rats on stilts except,
of course, they're beautiful.”
—Andrew Hudgins, from “Praying Drunk”
“I turned to the candies
Tiered like bleachers,
And asked what she wanted”
—Gary Soto, from “Oranges”
“Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl's wrist.”
—James Wright, from “A Blessing”
“Fog hanging like old
Coats between the trees.”
—Gary Soto, from “Oranges”
“I gave him the persimmons,
swelled, heavy as sadness,
and sweet as love.”
—Li-Young Lee, from “Persimmons”
“The apparition of a salsa band
gleaming in the Liberty Loan
pawnshop window:
Golden trumpet,
Silver trombone,
congas, maracas, tambourine,
all with price tags dangling
like the city morgue ticket
on a dead man's toe.”
—Martín Espada, “Latin Night at the Pawn Shop”
“massive buttocks slipping
like oiled parts with each light step”
—Philip Levine, from “Animals are Passing from our Lives”
“Maybe it was that exact
moment when Grace Kelly kissed Cary Grant
he took my hand and held it
to his lap and I felt something
burrowing there, slick and blind, like the kittens
black Trouble gave birth to in a box
in our garage.”
—Susan Wood, from “Matinee”
“Five billion miles away, a galaxy dies
like a snowflake falling on water.”
—Ted Kooser, from “Flying at Night”
“They bow shyly as wet swans.”
—James Wright, from “A Blessing”
“the white smoke of your breath
rising like a ghost.”
—Chris Tusa, from “Coma”
“the blade that opens the hole
and the pudgy white fingers
that shake out the intestines
like a hankie”
—Philip Levine, from “Animals are Passing from our Lives”
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