Katrina

Poetry Prompt: Extended Metaphor

/ Katrina Kaye

Today’s prompt has to do with extended metaphor. Extended metaphor is a rhetorical technique where a single metaphor is used at length.

The Prompt: Have you ever felt like something other than yourself? Write a poem where you compare yourself to something in an extended metaphor.

Follow this link to view my poem “Erosion” as an example: https://poetkatrinakaye.com/2024/04/24/erosion/

Till Death

/ Katrina Kaye

Katrina Kaye

They serve time together. They sleep late on Sunday mornings and catch up with the chores on the weekends. They have the same small way of passing time and use the same phrases when no one else is around.

They don’t need words half the time. The other half they do not have anything to say at all, but that’s okay, isn’t it? Time builds comfort into silence. How easy to serve time when you enjoy the company. How simple serving time has become when it asks so little.

Just an insistence on attention every once in a while, here and there, and when they forget the weight time has over them, they are gifted a grey hair or two, a sore back, and a faded memory. Because time needs to remind us that it is still in charge. It is selfish that way.

It is unapologetic for the days it takes and demands gratitude for all that it consents to give. How easy to give yourself over, to lose identity and singularity to the passing of time, the change of the calendar, the days and nights, the spring, winter, and eventual fall.

 

“Till Death” is previously published in The Fringe 999 (2024).

Transparent

/ Katrina Kaye

Katrina Kaye

I am nothing,
if not transparent;

skin a shallow

cloak

clearly

spotted with

intentions

colored and

shaded by layers

of cells

unfurling.

I am missing teeth,
the stubbornness
of religion; I am mourning
more than I thought I would.

I am combat.

I am ridiculous.

I am not even
a smile
and a lazy morning.

I am coated in silent patience,
an empty womb; I am dust 
in the sunlight, an afterthought;
a million miles removed.

I am nothing
if not easy to
see through.

I am ghost,

film,

translucent,

nothing.

“Transparent” is previously published in Otherwise Engaged (2022) and in Saturday’s Sirens (2020)