How Simile Worksby Albert GoldbarthThe drizzle-slicked cobblestone alleys of some city; and the brickwork back of the lumbering Galapagos tortoise they'd set me astride, at the "petting zoo".... The taste of our squabble still in my mouth the next day; and the brackish puddles sectioning the street one morning after a storm.... So poetry configures its comparisons. My wife and I have been arguing; now I'm telling her a childhood reminiscence, stroking her back, her naked back that was the particles in the heart of a star and will be again, and is hers, and is like nothing else, and is like the components of everything.