She is What’s Operative.

She is What’s Operative

by james bezerra

Metaphor is a substitution. It is like this: she is the pearl of the world. In the sweaty hungry ugly folds of the world. Metaphor is a switch being pulled. Three card word monty in the park.

She is what’s operative here. Replaced by a pearl. Like when she’d worn a strand of pearls that night at the restaurant with a view of Vltava. The strand of pearls, the only jewelry she’d packed; in a ziplock in the bottom of her backpack. I try to remember her the way she was that night. I call her Pearl now in my memories, because she was wearing pearls. That’s metonymy.

When she left, Pearl left an empty space. In me. Between the sweaty ugly hungry folds of my brain. An empty space that’s irritated. That I closed in upon. That I formed a shell around. That I tried to expel. A glistening sphere. A whole tiny world with a nucleus of nothing. That’s what metaphors are like.

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