I don’t look like I did when we met, I know I don’t.
I don’t even pretend that person can be brought back to the surface
through the use of hair products and makeup and starvation diets
and magical potions, that person is gone
that person only exists in the photographs I found tucked into your wallet
I’m so glad you still have them.
Please let me love you even though I’m old now.
We’re both old, but I feel so much older, let me
curl up against you while you sleep, let me listen to you breathe
while you sleep, I don’t know why you look the same to me.
I know I don’t look the same to you.
Please let me stay here and pretend I’m still young, and small.
Let me believe every once in a while that you still remember
I was the girl in those photographs I see you looking at every once in a while
I have no regrets. I have no regrets.
Author Bio: Holly Day (hollylday.blogspot.com) has been a writing instructor at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis since 2000. Her poetry has recently appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Grain, and Harvard Review, and her newest full-length poetry collections are Into the Cracks (Golden Antelope Press), Cross Referencing a Book of Summer (Silver Bow Publishing), The Tooth is the Largest Organ in the Human Body (Anaphora Literary Press), and Book of Beasts (Weasel Press).