Hate That Cat

This section covers poems and notes from January 10 through March 21. Jack, again, tells Miss Stretchberry he is “Brain broken” because he cannot come up with a simile. He does, however, go on to create examples of metaphor, hyperbole, and alliteration in the same message. He finally does compose a simile in which he compares a stuffed chair to a “pleasingly plump” mother. Miss Stretchberry responds, evidently asking Jack to “Go on” and explain why the chair is like such a mother. He writes that it sits quietly and waits for him but seems lonely because it has no dog to sit in its lap anymore when Jack is not there.

A week or so later, Jack says that he has finally “dug up a metaphor,” and it is about his new kitten; he’s named her Skitter McKitter because this describes how she moves and the sound her claws make (68). He writes a poem called “THE BLACK KITTEN” in which he calls his kitten a poet because she leaps among various surfaces like a poet leaps from line to line, sometimes fast and sometimes slow in a “silent steady rhythm” (70).