Not Four
By J.B. Hogan

Three is all you get,
four too many to expect,
yet for a time all too brief it seemed
like a maybe—maybe because she
was in the crowd that afternoon, and
later by her car and
at that get-together and then
that time uptown and
it seemed possible, maybe, that
she could be the fourth,
the fourth that mattered, the fourth and last but
there was something wrong, something
not quite right—he was disappointing,
not really cool, not so impressive, pretty common and
not special at all, not worth someone like her, the
one people talked about—it was her now,
she was the one who was creative and
rightfully talked about and
she had been simply missed, a
missed chance, missed in time and
circumstance, but she would
always be that last one,
the fourth one, the
one that couldn’t be had, the
one that luck had run out on, so
not just not the fourth but
not the last either because there wouldn’t be a
new last, there was not enough luck for that,
not enough to have her—the fourth and last, no,
not this time, and not again either,
not enough luck for that.