Lost and Found. by Larry Smith

I am calling the restaurant this morning
to see if they’ve found my sense of humor
which I lost with my appetite last night.
They are checking the lost and found.

I had been drinking the house red
and eating their Cesare Salad
when friends began talking of politics—
what’s wrong and how they can do nothing.
With a meatball just touching my lips
the talk turned to today’s religions.

The woman who answered now is checking the drawer.
“Where were you sitting?” she asks. I tell her, and
they are sending someone back to check. In this long
pause, I ask, “What else do you have in that box?”
She almost laughs, “Oh, a scarf, a pair of gloves,
two credit cards, and three memories—
did you lose any of that?” she asks.
I hold silence a long time wondering why I called,
and then I ask, “What size are the gloves?”

Larry Smith is a veteran poet, fiction writer, editor and publisher of Bottom Dog Press in Ohio which has published over 200 books of poems, fiction, and memoirs. His most recent book is Tu Fu Comes to America: A Story in Poems (2018). He is a biographer of Kenneth Patchen and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. He and his wife Ann live along the shores of Lake Erie in Ohio.