This is the last class day of my spring semester. I’m handing papers back this morning. Tonight, my creative writing students are preforming their 10 minute plays. Friday morning we head to Murray, KY for my graduation and to spend Mother’s Day with my parents.

No Sign of Poet Lost in Japan

The Japanese police said that a weeklong search had not turned up any details on the whereabouts of Craig Arnold, an American poet who has been missing on a Japanese island since last week.
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How a Simile Works

The 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.

Albert Goldbarth
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