A METAPHOR

                    by J. Estanislao Lopez 

​Imagine you raise a glass of iced water
to your lips, and, feeling a strange touch,
you look into the glass to find a dead gnat
floating at the surface. You see, there are
metaphors everywhere about the presence
of evil. But metaphors are misread.
We discover later in life, too late to change it,
that evil is not signified by the gnat
(the gnat is the casualty), but by the water,
which we raise to our lips every single day.

photo by Tasneem Mandviwala

J. Estanislao Lopez lives and teaches in Houston, TX. His work has appeared in Harvard Review, Ploughshares, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. He is currently an MFA candidate at Warren Wilson College.​
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