by Lesley Dame

Though it’s been years since I last heard
your cocky voice on an Autumn evening,
I come across a picture of you and your fiancé
on your mother’s social networking page.
If you’ve changed at all, you look younger,
your round baby face worry-free, and I wonder
if I ever felt attraction for you. I am struck
by something like gratitude and longing.
I dream a fantasy of the four of us meeting,
two couples forging through divergent lives,
and we reminisce about some old time, like
smoking cheap Cubans in front of Senior Frogs,
doing the tourist thing. Was that the night I fell
off the bed, arms numb? How we laughed in the dark,
my knees inching me forward, hands unable to prop
my body up. Even now a shadow fills me.
I remember more bad than good, and the pain
curls in my middle unsure if it should pass or stay.
I want to think we’re friends. Surely you’re not
the man who broke me like a bottle of cheap liquor.
Surely not the boy who could never crack my egg.

Lesley Dame is co-founder of and poetry and nonfiction editor for damselfly press. Author of the poetry chapbook Letting Out the Ghosts, her poems have also appeared in many online and print journals. Dame happily lives, writes, and edits is some rural town somewhere. For more information, visit her website, www.wix.com/lesleydame/poet.