Meeting An Old Lover by Paige Riehl | Poetry

Poetry – Issue 13 | September 2011

Meeting An Old Lover

by Paige Riehl

In Australia I’m jet lagged and waiting on the hotel bed
trying not to mess my hair and wondering what he’ll think:

thirteen more years sketched around my eyes, thirteen more pounds,
at least, circling my waist and hips. When I turn the corner

in the lobby, he smiles, hugs me, says my name as if it’s a memento,
and then This is weird and we both laugh because it is. On the ferry

to Manly Beach, he raises his arm and points, my tour guide.
When we hike up a path near the sea and I take off my jacket,

he sees my scarred arm and touches it, just for a moment,
says, I’m remembering now as if I am emerging slowly from

an ocean of women. In the sunlight we stare at the Pacific cold and deep;
thirteen years ago it was Scotland and the rainy Atlantic. Over beers

we talk about teaching and I can look at him—his hair
short and dark, not the long summer’s blond I remember

more insurance salesman than rock star, me more mother
than world traveler. He says he reads the story I published

about us at least once a year, finds the journal whenever
he moves, his claim to fame. He’s still unmarried, childless,

desires neither, his parents finally divorcing, a gift, he says. I think
of my husband and son at home, our backyard of flowers

and I feel myself letting go of something, as if releasing a breath
I didn’t even know I’d been holding.

Paige Riehl is accident prone, having accidentally boiled all her whites with one black sock in Ireland, swam above a shark in the Great Barrier Reef, consumed tap water in Morocco, and backpacked around seventeen countries. You can find her poetry now or forthcoming in publications such as Avatar Review, Blood Orange Review, Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry, and Word Riot, to name a few.

Read our current issue, Issue 13 | September 2011:

Literary Bohemian

Poetry – Issue 13 | September 2011