By Margot Wizansky

Come back, dearest friend of my teens,
come back so I can make it right with you,
walk with you a while in your dying.
Come back—we can relive our awakenings,
our first loves, our laughter bubbling
like your mother’s yoghurt soup.
I miss you. You blasted into eighth grade
from another galaxy, exotic like I’d never seen,
curtained with black shiny hair that covered
your lazy eye, made you tilt your head to look at me.
I miss your noisy, crowded house—I’d never even
heard of Syria—food I’d never tasted, grape leaves,
kibbeh, labneh, your eyes glowing like olives,
the music low and sad, a dirge repeating,
an unfiltered cigarette your constant,
always indoors we were, smoking,
playing cards in the kitchen while the pita baked.
I’d been a child in a family buffeted by a war
that took the men off and I deluded myself
about my own importance. I was not a kind child.
Don’t be angry with me. I gaze into the reflecting
pools of your eyes, tell you I’m sorry love so often
got caught in my bristles. Love is alive in the naming.
I’m sorry for saying anything else.
I’ve been lucky. My luck could run out any time,
old comrade, like it did for you.

About the Author

Margot Wizansky’s chapbook, Wild for Life, was published with Lily Poetry Review Books (2022). The Yellow Sweater, her full-length poetry collection, is available from Kelsay Press (2023). Her poems have appeared online and in many journals such as The American Journal of Poetry, The Missouri Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Ruminate, River Styx, Cimarron, and elsewhere. She edited anthologies: Mercy of Tides: Poems for a Beach House, and Rough Places Plain: Poems of the Mountains. She co-edited What the Poem Knows, a tribute to Barbara Helfgott Hyett, her teacher. She won two residencies, one with Writers@Work in Salt Lake City and also with Carlow University in Sligo, Ireland. Margot is from a career developing housing for adults with disabilities. She lives in Massachusetts.