Reciprocal Poem by Ben Partenay

This is what we had wasn’t it.
A slow sad song that was stuck
in my head for weeks.

Like the time the sink broke
and dripped water till the city
stopped. We were young

and young is what we had
clenched tight in soft fists
from soap and formaldehyde.

The way we never agreed on
whether a sunset was greater
than a sunrise and how very

wrong we all were, but we had
this and that was all that was
needed. How to explain it.

This was not a that or a poem
like any other. It was the way
you talked about how Plath

made you feel alive and the
irony in that statement. There
was always the irony we had

along with the beat of our own
drums. An orchestra could have
never kept up. We always agreed

on that.