not with you
one day I went to the pub without you,
with a different man, in fact,
with a friend.
the waitress knew me
and she looked at me hard
when she seated us.
sometimes you see a look
on someone’s face
and there
is a recognition,
you know exactly what they mean,
or so you think.
but you can never quite be sure
if what you recognized
was something they said,
or only a mirror
or both.
limbic resonance, it’s called:
when you fall into a feeling together.
***
what I saw in her face
was relief.
she was relieved
because I
was not with you.— Amy Isikoff Newell, December 2022
Please also consider checking out this song I wrote with my friend Nat Budin based on this poem.
Not with you