A simile is a figule of speech that compares two unlike
things using the word like or as. Identify a simile Mora uses in 'Teenagers"
that suggests what the speaker's grown children are like.

Answer and Explanation:

This is the poem "Teenagers" by Pat Mora:

One day they disappear

into their rooms.

Doors and lips shut

and we become strangers

in our own home.

I pace the hall, hear whispers,

a code I knew but can't remember,

mouthed by mouths I taught to speak.

Years later the door opens.

I see faces I once held,

open as sunflowers in my hands. I see

familiar skin now stretched on long bodies

that move past me

glowing almost like pearls.

As was described in the question, a simile compares two different things with the help of "as" or "like". The purpose is to attribute a characteristic of one of those things to the other.

In the poem, the speaker is using a simile when she says, "open as sunflowers in my hands." Her children are now big, much bigger than she could have expected them to become in just a few years. It's as if she is surprised by the fact that they are no longer babies. They are grown, different, just like a flower is when it opens, when it ceases being just a bud.