by HDJ Board Member, Stacy Boe Miller

It’s easy to tie ourselves, our body, or our emotions to nature with metaphor and simile. We do it all the time. “My love is like a red red rose.”

But what if we wrote nature inside the body? No simile. No metaphor. No explanation. What if the branches in your lungs were actual branches? What if rivers of the veins turned out to hold fish? Maybe there are constellations in a dark corner of your thighs.

The poem “Terrible Dear” from Zachary Schomburg’s book Fjords Vol. 1 (Black Ocean, 2012) takes us from a familiar place into a surreal world in one quick move in which a terrible deer that has been clawing and biting at his insides crashes out of him. We don’t think about whether it’s possible or not. That doesn’t matter. All that matters is what we are made to feel.

Write nature in the body. Work on letting it live with no explanation. Don’t lean on metaphor or simile. See if you can evoke an emotion just from this one move.

Stacy Boe Miller grew up in a small town in Wyoming near the Black Hills. She currently lives in northern Idaho. Stacy is a poet and nonfiction writer, and received her MFA from the University of Idaho. Her work can be found in Northwest Review, River Teeth's Beautiful Things, Terrain.org, Copper Nickel, and other journals. She currently serves as the Poet Laureate of the city of Moscow. Find out more at stacyboemiller.com.