A Return

To hear from, say, a friend you might have loved

from whom you have not heard in quite a while

and you know something of their drang and sturm

so that you were beginning to worry,

brings back the first play that you ever saw

when the audience clapped for Peter Pan

and brought the dying fairy Tinker Bell—

onstage, a blinking flashlight—back to life.

Not that the friendship’s like a fairy; but

the flutter feels like the return of light.

James B. Nicola's nonfiction book Playing the Audience won a Choice Magazine award. A graduate of Yale, he has received a Dana Literary Award, two Willow Review awards, and the Storyteller's People's Choice award.