To a Friend Now Dead

Touch: The Journal of Healing

by Alarie Tennille

You live so vividly

in college memories

that I promise

your husband photos

that never existed.

I search my album.

You were there …

and there … not more

than eight feet from me.

Behind the camera’s eye,

too shy to be the focus

of attention.

I forgot our game —

how you would turn

just as I snapped.

I always lost you behind

a black silk curtain of hair.

I lost you again tonight.

Alarie Tennille is a Pushcart Prize nominee and author of a chapbook, Spiraling into Control. She serves on the Board of Directors of The Writers Place in Kansas City, Missouri. Alarie’s poems have appeared in numerous journals including Margie, Poetry East, English Journal, I-70 Review, and Untitled Country Review.