Here’s This Thing by Alec Solomita

Here’s this thing I keep remembering:

We’ve just crossed Washington Road walking

toward Nassau Hall, alongside the chapel,

and it’s very early in our affair and I still think, 

and let’s face it I’m right, that you are a bit of a square.

You’ve wearing your conservative yet fashionable

soon-to-be-assistant-dean suit, and I’m wearing

my untucked grad student look, and we’re in a hurry,

having spent lunch hour consuming each other.

If only I could remember how the subject came up, what 

small worry might have prompted the comment I made

that I can no longer remember, and if it was timid

or more likely my street bravado dirty, or, as you would

say, bawdy, yes, you might well say bawdy 

to describe the comment that I can’t bring back, you in your 

19th-century English Lit. advanced degree argot. 

I know exactly where we were and I recall the squirrels 

stopped their incessant incessing and the birds shut up too

and you, in your impeccably cadenced and musical speech, 

offered, “Don’t get me wrong, I love it from behind,” 

pleased, chirpy, as if you were telling a conference room 

full of deans, “I think the Power Point is working now!”

Alec Solomita is a writer working in the Boston area. His fiction has appeared in the Southwest Review, The Mississippi Review, Southword Journal, among other publications. He was shortlisted by the Bridport Prize and Southword Journal. His poetry has appeared in Poetica, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Driftwood Press, The Rye Whiskey Review, The Galway Review, and elsewhere, including several anthologies. His poetry chapbook “Do Not Forsake Me,” was published in 2017. His full-length poetry book,b“Hard To Be a Hero,” was released by Kelsay Books last May.