"Who did you used to be?" is reunion small talk, a question that expects a job title and a polite laugh. Mary F. C. Pratt's speaker answers it with a list so odd that the poem seems at first like a comic riff: she was the dissected frog, the lunch lady, the custodian, a mannequin, a physics teacher, a whole band of bad instruments. Only in the ninth stanza does the joke give way. "But mostly," she says, "I was the girl who wanted you / to ask me to the Christmas Dance."
Nobody can literally be a frog and a teacher, so the list works as a figure of speech. Judging by the poem, the speaker was everywhere in this person's school life, in every role that touched him, yet he never registered her as herself. The poem keeps returning to seeing and not seeing. The frog is made to "twitch" so that someone can watch it. The custodian helps with the locker when the "you" "couldn't see / through your tears," so the kindness goes unrecognized because he is blind with grief. The cheerleader dummy sits in a display case, looked at by everyone and addressed by no one. It is a body on show, dressed in a "faded letter sweater" and a skirt "just above my pale pink knees."
Many of these roles are about bodies being measured. She is the "largest" lunch lady, "chubby," a "loser" who can't do ten chin-ups, while the "you" is "so thin." That gives the humor an undertone of adolescent self-consciousness. The comedy is also turned on herself. As Mrs. Barry she admits to being "terrible, tedious," and to ridiculing a daydreamer, which is a little ironic in a poem that is itself a kind of daydream. The physics teacher's pet phrase, "Tangenital velocity," is printed in a spelling that hides the word "genital" inside it, which would explain why the students cough to cover their laughter. A tangent also touches a circle at a single point before flying off, and the word may quietly describe how she brushed against this person's life. That reading is an inference, but it fits.
Sound matters too. The glockenspiel is "a little out of sync," the trumpet "spit-filled," the clarinet "gasped and wailed." These are comic images of bad playing, but "out of sync" is also the poem's emotional situation, and the gasping, wailing clarinet hints at the hurt the jokes are covering.
The form supports this. The poem is ten unrhymed quatrains in free verse, with no fixed meter and a chatty, spoken voice that even interrupts itself with "Remember?" The sentences refuse to stay inside their stanzas. Stanzas end on dangling phrases such as "I was," "Once I" and "When I," and the next stanza supplies the identity. The self is always being handed on to the next role and never quite arrives. The pattern is steady enough that the stanza beginning "But mostly" lands as a change of gear, where the flippant list becomes confession.
The ending is the poem's best stroke. The speaker sits alone at home "staring at the newspaper clipping" of the boy in "baggy basketball shorts, / your mouth open / as you tried to catch / the rebound that never came." The photograph freezes him in mid-reach for something that does not arrive, and that mirrors her evening of waiting for an invitation that does not arrive. It also reverses the frog stanza. Earlier he watched her twitch, and now she is the one watching, with all the attention she could not get. Pratt never describes his reaction to her or tells us how she feels now, and she ends on the image, which is more affecting than a statement of regret would be.
The poem matters because it takes a throwaway social ritual and uses it to show how people are remembered by their functions: the one who gave extra jello, the one who opened the locker. Real longing can sit unnoticed behind all of those functions. By letting the humor carry the pain, the poem makes an old teenage disappointment feel both funny and sharp.