Speakers like the middle-aged woman in "Anguiano Religious Articles" and the elderly man in "Los Boxers" use no real figures of speech at all, as if their tiredness, or perhaps their long practice of conventionality, had depleted them of the gift of metaphor. On the other hand, "Rogelio Velasco" (a.k.a. Flavio Munguía) in "Tin Tan Tan" uses one tired, trite, and generally badly mixed metaphor after another, so awkwardly that they are unintentionally funny ("now that you have yanked my golden dreams from me, I shiver from this chalice of pain like a tender white flower tossed in rain"); when he ventures to coin his own figure, this poet with a tin ear unfortunately decides to allude to the circumstances under which he and his Lupe met: "Perhaps I can exterminate the pests of doubt . . . ."
Finally, Cisneros characters who are really imaginative artists use a language that is original, unique to each as an individual, and pleasingly concrete. For example, Chayo, of "Little Miracles, Kept Promises," uses metaphor to color a catalog of specific images: "Silk roses, plastic roses . . . Caramel-skinned woman in a white graduation cap and gown . . . Teenager with a little bit of herself sitting on her lap . . . ." She says her cut-off braid is "the color of coffee in a glass" and compares it to "the donkey tail in a birthday game"; her figures are complex, concrete, and unforced. Clemencia, in "Never Marry a Mexican," uses perhaps fewer figures (and fewer original ones) than the other artist-characters, and this may be because she is bitter and unhappy; her emotions may deplete her creative imagination. Still when she does speak figuratively, her language can be intensely original, as when she describes her relationship to her mother after her father's death by comparing it wrenchingly to a pet bird's injured leg, which eventually dried up and fell off. The bird "was fine, really," she concludes, her brisk assessment in painful contrast to her description of the injury. And, in contrast to Clemencia, Lupe of "Bien Pretty" uses a wide range of figurative imagery, from her mock-horrific description of the cockroaches' "cannibal rites" to her metaphors for the Spanish language ("That sweep of palm leaves and fringed shawls. That startled fluttering, like the heart of a goldfinch . . . ") that recall "Ixchel's" myth-like utterances.
