I very much dislike being at a buffet
                                                                        – Mary Ruefle

I stand in the stairwell say to him that he
and I aren’t going to work out, him being
a cowboy, aspiring cop. He marries a librarian.
I go on to psychedelics, sit-ins, join a cult,

marry and move to a place he would’ve hated.
My mother tells me, twenty years in, she’s
heard he still has my picture on his mantle.
You never lose the first he-was-everything-to-me.

I’ve googled him over the years, imagined
how a call might go, nearly did one summer.

From the poem “How We Met” from Dunce

– Hari B Parisi