The poem "How It Is" by Maxine Kumin is about the suicide of Anne Sexton, a close friend of Kumin. They were close to one another in age and would routinely share their poems with one another and critique them and even collaborated on several works. Kumin was the last person to see Sexton alive.

Sexton's blue blazer serves as a metaphor for Sexton herself and her influence on Kumin. It serves as both a reminder of Sexton's presence and of her absence. Sexton committed suicide by putting on her mother's fur coat, drinking vodka, and then sitting in the garage with her car running and dying of carbon monoxide poisoning. In the poem, Kumin wishes she could unwind time back to when her friend was alive. She thinks of the death using the metaphor of the collage, with the different elements of the sequence of Sexton's acts being compared to the separate elements that comprise an artistic collage. 

Part of the sense of collage or fragmentation is given by sentence fragments, perhaps the most common lexical deviations of the poems. Examples are the lines beginning with "In the ... In the ... In my ...." Kumin also makes frequent use of the rhetorical device of asyndeton, omitting grammatically expected connective words. 

In "How It Is" by Maxine Kumin, how do metaphors, deviations, and parallelism contribute to the poem's meaning?

Let's start with Kumin's deviations in language and grammar, which are numerous. I also think that we can talk about lexical and semantic deviations simultaneously. There is, after all, the field of lexical semantics, which deals specifically with the meanings of words and phrases in text.

To illustrate the feelings of the narrator in the wake of a loved one's death, Kumin upturns our traditional understanding of what words mean, what they ought to do, and how they ought to be organized. This reshuffling of language parallels the reorganization that occurs in life in the aftermath of a loved one's death.

The first example of semantic deviation occurs at the end of the first stanza: "My skin presses your old outline. / It is hot and dry inside." The narrator has reduced her old friend's jacket, the one she wears "a month after [her] death," to an "old outline." The reference to an outline is especially macabre, as we know that the police make chalk outlines of the deceased in homicide investigations. The narrator's loved one has also died an "unnatural death": a suicide resulting from "the death car idling in the garage." The narrator gives the outline a temperature and interiority: it is hot and dry inside.

Other examples of semantic deviation include the following: "praying hands unlaced" and "a ceremony of sandwich." Choosing the word "unlaced" instead of "folded" gives the friend's hands a limp and fragile quality. The "ceremony of sandwich" occurs on the last day of his or her life, giving something as mundane as the tuna sandwich he or she makes a mortal significance it would not otherwise have. Both phrases occur in a stanza that, grammatically, is a run-on sentence (grammatical deviation):