Like
As I led the man through the crowded restaurant and to his table at the back he said, you sure are packing us in here like on slave ships when he could have said anything else: packing us in here like daisies into a grocery-store bouquet, packed together like the pages of a wet book, like A-listers in a Wes Anderson movie, like hemorrhoid cream in an unopened tube, like pennies in a pickle jar, like forty to fifty exuberant rural children in an underfunded classroom, like a family of polar bears crowded together on a floating sheet of ice— he could have said, even, like your ass in those jeans. Blood in a syringe, silver compact vehicles on the beltline at rush hour, styrofoam tight in its cardboard box. Yes, I was packing him in there, like textured ground-beef material into a Taco Bell Grilled Stuft Burrito, like Amish girls in the back of a white van on the way to Walmart. Like bone regrowing inside a plaster cast. Like the flames in a fire, like the fingers in my fist. first published in The Yale Review (June 2023)
I came across this poem not long ago and haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. It does that remarkable something a poem can do — making such stark critique of language while using a language so vividly and stylistically singular. I have, nearly every day since I first read it, been thinking of this poem. I have been thinking of it while teaching, uttering a phrase like figurative language for the thousandth time, annoyed at myself for feeling bored by it, even as I know what something like figurative language can do. I have been thinking of it while reading, while watching the news, while engaging with a world that, each day, makes violence out of language by reducing it to something trite, reproducible, and generic. And so I have been thinking of this poem a lot, because it reminds me — as I often need reminding — of language’s capacity to harm just as it also holds the capacity to bring joy, to bear witness, to surprise, to confound, and to express the wellspring of shit that moves through us and in us and around us as we move through, in, and around the world.
Today’s poem uses a single moment of observed language as a catalyst for all that follows:
he said, you sure are packing us in here like on slave ships when he could have said anything else
When Debevec-McKenney cites this racist, harmful, and violent simile above, she reminds us that language is a vehicle of wild power, even — and perhaps especially — when it is utilized with willful disregard. Sometimes, too, when it is utilized with a smile. As a joke. As an attempt to play fast and loose with someone or something, a feeling or an idea.
From here, Debevec-McKenney writes a poem that critiques the racist, harmful, and violent language observed in that simile above, yes. And she also reminds us, through this critique, about the empowering and delightful aspects of comparison, and of language itself. And she also — in a way I really adore — shows off. She shows off her powers of attention, of relation, of awareness, of willingness.
And I think that’s what I love the most about this poem, how it shapes a critique of someone’s harmful use of language into a kind of reinvestment in the often-delighting power of language itself. It does this by using the same figurative tool — a simile, a comparison of unlike things — that was used with such harm in the poem’s beginning. And then a whole host of other figurative tools: repetition, rhythm, defamiliarization, a well-placed comma, the excision, at times, of the word like, only to bring it back again.
I mean, I can’t help but marvel at some of these ways that Debevec-McKenney says he could have said anything else:
like daisies into a grocery-store bouquet
like hemorrhoid cream in an unopened tube
like textured ground-beef material into a Taco Bell Grilled Stuft Burrito
These moments of comparison do so much. They critique and poke at that harmful, violent simile that serves as the poem’s catalyst, yes. But in their critique, they also remind us that we have a responsibility to use our language for something more than trite, generic, easy-to-weaponize bullshit.
A simile (or metaphor, or any moment of comparison) works because it defamiliarizes something through an act of relational placement. It places one object or idea or feeling next to something you might never have placed it next to yourself. The skill in crafting a simile that stuns someone into surprise or delight or pure, visceral feeling is in a kind of openness. As a writer, you cultivate that openness by moving through the world and seeing the very possibility of connection between everything, even things that seem so remotely unconnected you couldn’t possibly bring them together. But you can, you know. That’s possible. It always is. And so you wonder, sometimes, what might happen if you placed a feeling outside of the context of something experienced in the heart and into the context of something experienced in the world.
But a simile falls flat when such comparison is made without openness — with a resistance, in fact, to the imagination. When it reduces one’s conception of the world rather than expands it — just like when a joke punches down instead of up. The simile that begins this poem today falls flat for that very reason. It exhibits reductive thinking, something that discourages relation rather than encourages. This happens all the time in our world. In shitty jokes. In the way those who have a great deal of power talk about those who don’t. In ways small and large — each way, though, its own act of reduction.
But the similes that follow that first simile — the ones crafted by Debevec-McKenney — work because they deepen and expand our understanding of both our feelings and the world itself. Notice how each comparison that Debevec-McKenney offers us is a comparison that works twofold. First, the comparison achieves the literal, physical quality of explaining how densely the people are sitting together at the restaurant. Yes, that’s fine. But notice how the second act of each comparison is to offer us something. And that something changes as the poem progresses.
Debevec-McKenney uses one comparison that absolutely delights:
like daisies into a grocery-store bouquet
She uses another that, well, kind of disgusts (which is, and can be, a feeling of delight, given our surprise at the fact of being disgusted, and our joy at the fact of being surprised):
like hemorrhoid cream in an unopened tube
She uses another that calls to mind (and critiques) the state of our education system:
like forty to fifty exuberant rural children in an underfunded classroom
And another that burns into our brains the real consequences of a warming world:
like a family of polar bears crowded together on a floating sheet of ice
In these moments, Debevec-McKenney reminds us that comparison is not done simply for the sake of comparison, which is another reminder that words cannot simply be words alone — they always hold their capacity to hurt, to harm, to heal, to delight, to enrage, to surprise, to stun, and to love. Here, in these moments of comparison, Debevec-McKenney fills words with the entirety of their capacity, which requires both the awareness to see the world as a thing filled with so much that can be placed in relation to so much, and the desire to take the risk and do the work of using, really using, language as a tool of delight and critique at once. This craft; this art-making — it is a work of real care.
There’s a poem by Daniel Moysaenko, recently published in The Nation, that works with simile and comparison in a stunning, powerful way. Here it is, in full:
A tank loaded with washing machines wrapped like Rodins looted from disemboweled apartments, on its way to join mercenaries who’ll half-dig graves in a half-frozen pine forest before taking a nap, passes a cruise missile lodged nose-first in the road and painted “for the kids,” passes a bullet-sprayed car and soup kitchen worker who will change his walking route trailed by a campaign of dogs, past gouges in the square where a kid in clown makeup dances a figure eight, for whom terror clings to the sound of tambourines, to balaclavas, to the scent of a busted tomato, leaking.
[W]ashing machines wrapped / like Rodins. What a defamiliarizing simile, a comparison that takes an image from war — which is a thing that our media tries to render generic and normal each day — and uses it to make us see how violence, tragically, makes us change our conception of value and alter our ordinary experience of the world. It changes everything, violence does. This poem makes that clear. But it makes it clear because it is open to act of seeing the world so deeply and relationally. That act of seeing is an act of care.
Such care is a radical thing in the face of the way those in power often weaponize language by using it to reduce our capacity to see the world with depth. As the poet Mosab Abu Toha pointed out, just the other day, CNN ran a headline that read:
From there, it took the article two paragraphs to mention the 45,553 Palestinians who have been killed since 2023, focusing instead of the mass exodus of over 100,000 people. Imagine that — a word like falling instead of dying. A word that discourages us to look again, rather than a word that encourages us to see the world as it is. That’s language used without care, but with power. Awful.
And so, I feel a great sense of humility when I encounter poems such as Debevec-McKenney’s or Moysaenko’s. I really do. I wonder how often I employ that same care in my own work, and in my own life. And I think about how often I fall prey to the generic use of language that can so quickly turn harmful. I think about teaching my high schoolers, and how I have breezed over something like a simile in order to move onto something I feel is more important in the moment, not realizing, then, how comparison is part of the way we make sense of the world. Which means, too, that it is part of the way we build the world imaginatively. And which means, sadly, that it is also part of the way we undo what has been built. That undoing is an act of violence. It happens every day.
I think of how, in the cultural discourse around language that reached its height years ago, there were people who longed for a freedom of speech that allowed them to say whatever they wanted without fear of cancellation or trigger warnings, and people who wanted to remind others that freedom of speech does not mean you are protected from the consequences of such speech. Debevec-McKenney’s poem today reminds me that people really can still say whatever they want. They can look into a room of crowded people and make the comparison to a slave ship with either willful ignorance or willful disregard of the harm and violence of such a comparison. People can still do that. Without consequence, truly. And with the protection of their power, or their ignorance.
But today’s poem also reminds me that how you use language is also how you live. There are two main characters in this poem — the person who makes that first comparison, and then the speaker, who crafts a poem out of the moment. It’s a poem that doesn’t just offer a litany of other worthwhile comparisons. It’s a poem that also, by virtue of being itself, and by virtue of seeing in this moment of harm a moment of possibility, educates both that first character and us, the readers, on language itself — its power, its delight, its expansiveness. Yes, this poem is a poem that teaches. You could’ve said anything else, the poem says. But it doesn’t stop there. It says: here are some models. But it doesn’t stop there. It says: here are some models of delight, of disgust, of critique, of more. It says: I wish you had considered them. But it says, too, by the fact of its existence: you still could. That’s wonderful teaching, you know.
And so, I am holding this poem close as a reminder that our responsibility toward language is also part of our responsibility to each other, that how we use language to delight, to inform, to enrage, to enliven, and to love reflects our desire to make one another laugh, know, feel, and live. How we see words, then, shows how we see each other. And to see each other, to really see each other, is one of the great gifts we can give each other. And our failure to see each other — which we see models of, sadly, so often — is one of the great losses we experience on a daily basis. Language, then, is an act of seeing. Let it be open, then. And let it be possible.
Some ongoing notes:
If you are interested, I will be teaching a second section of online class with the Adirondack Center for Writers on getting away from a prescriptive language when it comes to reading and writing poetry. Thank you to those who signed up for the first section. Details to come on dates for the second! It will most likely begin in March, and I’ll post a link here next week to register. Here’s a class description from the first section of the class that will apply for the future section: A poem is an offering. In this five-week class, poet and critic Devin Kelly will introduce students to a language of generosity for modern poetry. Instead of talking prescriptively about a poem’s quality (“good” or “bad”), students will take an expansive and holistic approach to engaging with poetry and crafting their own. Works by Larry Levis, Mary Oliver, Ross Gay, W.S. Merwin, and many others will serve as models for developing and practicing what Kelly calls “a vocabulary of grace”. Think of a poem as a window, a room, or a landscape—something that expands the more you pay attention to it. Students will discuss and write new poems weekly, and twice over the course of five weeks everyone will receive one-on-one feedback from Kelly on their work.
You can find a list of the work that Writers Against the War on Gaza is doing to build solidarity among writers in support of Palestinian and against their consistent oppression here.
Workshops 4 Gaza is an organization of writers putting together donation-based writing workshops and readings in support of Palestine and in awareness of a more just, informed, thoughtful, considerate world. You can follow them here and get more information about them here.
If you’ve read any of the recent newsletters, you’ve perhaps noticed that I am offering a subscription option. This is functioning as a kind of “tip jar.” If you would like to offer your monetary support as a form of generosity, please consider becoming a paid subscriber below. There is no difference in what you receive as a free or paid subscriber; to choose the latter is simply an option to exercise your generosity if you feel willing. I am grateful for you either way. Thanks for your readership.
I love starting my Sunday mornings with your stunning observations in my inbox. Thank you so much. I want to take the class but can’t do it in February, so I’m very happy you plan to offer another.
Thanks for introducing me to these wonderful poems and the beautiful reminder about "how you use language is also how you live."