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Essay Against Metaphor
My baby has become a gun,
his mahogany stock snug on my shoulder.
He is thin, hard, gleaming.
He opens his mouth and reports
and automatically
the milk lets down.
~
At the artist’s residency, I see
the printmaker gather grass
to create texture on copper and
I see the sculptor fill a bucket
with dandelions to make wine.
I go out and plant my head
against a birch tree. I sit
in my room naked and write.
White crabapple trees blossom
in the poems and I think about metaphors.
Metaphor from the Greek to carry.
Metaphor like when Plath said she boarded
a train there was no getting off.
~
A conceit is a metaphor that has been strained,
left logic behind, shows the ropes
that hold up the poem, like when John Donne
says that the flea is like his mistress’s virginity,
that blood in the flea’s body is like a marriage,
that killing the flea is like killing him.
~
Reader, you probably don’t have to worry about your baby becoming a gun.
In order for this to happen, you must first be writing a book about guns
and then, in the middle, have a baby.
Yes, one minute everything is guns—
rotating chambers, filigree handles, smoke
dissipating around your father’s face—
And the next moment, someone sticks
their fingers through your abdominal muscles
and pulls out your baby and absolutely everything
is babies: hailstorms of babies splashing into puddles
of babies, their fingers and toes, their tiny penises
and vulvas, their sweet swollen tummies,
they are all over, so you must put them
into your poems, and if you are already writing the book
about guns, have been writing it for years, the babies
must be introduced immediately to the book about guns.
You must yoke them together by force.
~
I am reading about the gun in our cultural consciousness.
I am reading about how the gun is our id.
I am reading about how carrying a gun
is making yourself a deputy of the sovereign state.
I am reading about how metaphors get born.
I am reading about how a deer can become a metaphor,
about how a gun can become a deer,
about how anything can turn into anything
and that is why metaphors cannot be kicked out
and deer are often infected with fleas
and babies are not like guns, but mine is.
~
In the above section, I first wrote “you”
and had to go back and replace it
with “I.”
~
Freud says that for a mother, the baby
is the phallus, the metaphorical penis
that brings her closer to being a man.
My friend texts me: “You cannot fuck
with Freud.”
~
I try to sit silent under the tree,
but I need to text my dad
“I think you would like it here”
and I need to take a little video for Instagram
and I need to make everything real
for myself and my sixty followers
and when I use the breast pump five times a day
I need to watch a video of my real baby crying
to get the real milk to fall into my breasts and out
into the plastic bag I hope to FedEx
back home for my baby to drink.
The pump is not a gun, but it reminds me of one
because it is a machine that makes me
want to kill something.
~
Anne Carson writes about her dreams
and calls them “Nudes.”
My favorite is the one with the room of opalescent white
with “neither planes nor angles” that is “almost wet.”
I have always thought of it as a metaphor
for the womb. When I applied to this residency,
I was not yet pregnant. My womb
not yet filled with metaphors.
~
As I write about breastfeeding, the milk comes down.
Poetry made something happen.
~
Marianne Moore says poems are “imaginary gardens
with real toads in them.” There is a snapping turtle
in the concrete pool here. They cannot release her
into the wild. She will not eat worms,
only manufactured turtle food. Hand fed.
~
I think poems are much easier than people make them sometimes.
I recently leaked this opinion.
I said, What’s the big deal?
I sit down in the morning.
I write fifteen or twenty lines.
I change some words, relineate.
I think I am here by accident.
I think poetry is a scam.
I think I am an imagined woman with a real baby outside me.
~
In the leaked draft of the Supreme Court decision
reversing Roe v. Wade, Samuel Alito writes
ninety-eight pages. I try to read them
to find out whether he uses metaphors,
but instead I watch videos of women
contouring their cheeks. My scalp tingling
for a touch that will not come.
~
Now that my baby is a gun,
he can be held against a woman’s temple.
His lips are still pink, eyes still blue.
I haven’t spoken to my father
about abortion in a while.
I suspect that he suspects
that my gun/baby changed my mind
& this amuses me
because when I was pregnant, I gained sixty pounds
& my skin bubbled like lava
& my ribs got bent outward
& I was in the hospital for four days crying.
I cried for so long
because my baby could not breathe &
his brain bled &
he was cooled for several days &
before I had a chance to hold him,
he had become a gun. The benefits
of this procedure are unclear.
~
I think that poems are real wombs
with imagined miracles in them.
~
Alito says that any rights protected
must be “deeply rooted” in our nation’s history and traditions.
“Deeply rooted” is an implied metaphor
that compares our rights to a tree.
Metaphors that have metaphored
for too long—these we call clichés.
These we call trees
whose roots have dried.
~
You get pregnant, you have a baby
(or you don’t).
You pull the trigger, a dove falls out of the sky
(or it doesn’t).
You pump milk, the little drops fall down into the plastic container
(or your baby starves).
You turn up the vacuum. You watch videos. You cry.
See there? The I
has become the you.
~
I am pumping milk and reading
the leaked opinion. It quotes
Mississippi’s law prohibiting abortion
after fifteen weeks. It quotes a part that tells me
when an “unborn human” can do different things:
six weeks it has a heart. Eight weeks it kicks.
Ten weeks it has little toenails. I would be lying
if I said this did not cause me to imagine
my son’s toenails. That’s where they get you.
That’s synecdoche. Another kind of metaphor
I am deciding to be against.
~
It didn’t have to be this way.
I could have kept on being a poet,
with my real or fake frogs or turtles or trees.
But like with our guns, we are not responsible
with our metaphors. We squash real toads
with our imaginary black boots. We cradle
imaginary guns and throw real babies
into our truck beds overnight and forget
to rub them down with oil.
~
I believe that the speaker’s mistress
in Donne’s “The Flea,” who purples
her nail in the “blood of innocence,”
knows where she can find a midwife with strong hands,
has hidden under her bed a pearl-encrusted dagger,
is planning very soon
to go to sea.
~
The main reason I am sad
that my baby has become a gun
is because of how small
he looked in the glass bassinet,
how as I tried to pull him off
my nipple he kept right on
mouthing, tenacious, a dandelion. 
Essay Against Metaphor
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