New Photograph, by Eric Smith

I remember you from a photograph, a nude, I saw on the wall of a ratty third-floor walkup in a fashionably bad part of town. Yes, I lived there. Actually, it wasn’t you in the photo; it was someone who resembled you. Quite funny, what? But that would be a subtle, rare kind of humor—simultaneously obvious and dry—like a particularly delightful wine enjoyed on a Saturday Fall evening by a few friends in their early thirties who had known one another (intimately in some cases) throughout their youth. It may be too much to expect.