You Asked Me For My Number

 3/31/2026 (c) 

 

It’s hard to say what counts.

 

I don’t think it’s fair to me

to start tallying up

sex partners before the first orgasm—

or without one.

 

Without orgasm

sex is either practice,

or punishment.

 

So I won’t count Mike, Charlie, Paul or Eddie.

Counting starts with my husband.

 

That’s one.

 

Except Charlie nearly came through for me

thirty years later

in a rare encounter—

two-fifths of vodka

mutual grieving—

the untimely passing of his best friend—

my boyfriend. 

 

Theoretically, do repeats count

as one, or two?

 

Still at one.

 

Chris, Warren, and James—

all impotent.  

 

Chris groped me for hours every Friday

in the back booth

at the Fifth Avenue Bar and Grill—

 

I got home, climbed on my husband,

fantasizing about Chris—

 

how would I count that?

 

 

René is two.

Five years—more or less.

 

He enjoyed breaking up with me.

It made me pathetic and needy.

I won’t count anyone I was with

while René neglected me.

 

That discounts Kevin, Al, and Hoyt,

all married

who would probably appreciate

if I didn’t count them.

 

I don’t count date rape.

I am still at two.

 

I’d like to count Don—

that relationship was significant.

 

I can’t add significance—

everyone was—

a grade school crush

a first kiss,

a love letter with check-boxes to return—

 

we’d be up in the 100s in no time.

 

I’m sad to say, Alex counts. 

It’s hard to count a stalker—

always there to remind me

I stopped thinking he was special.

 

Alex makes three.

 

Until I started this poem

I’d forgotten Gavin.

 

If one is forgettable

they don’t deserve to be counted.

 

For four years Rick made four.

 

And you,

inquisitive,

don’t get to be 5.

Do Over

 2015 - rev 2026

When my daughter—

twenty-three, pregnant,

unemployed, single—

asked me if I would do it over again—

 

if I would go through with it,

or would I abort her,

let some fundamentalist Christian family

raise her—

 

 Christ, I said “of course,”

and kept twenty years

of do-over scenarios to myself. 

 

Because if I could do it again,

I would not have married him.

My sister warned me—

I knew better than everyone—

even when I didn’t.

 

Every promise turned out empty. 

 

I realize now I should have married him,

taken out life insurance,

killed him myself.

I would have worn my wedding gown

let it catch the blow-back, then buried him in it.

 

Then I would have flown to Mexico,

learned Spanish—

crusaded for the girls in the maquiladoras.  

My problems are universal.

 

I’ll never learn Spanish. 

 

I’d instruct my younger self—

studied computers,

get a job at Microsoft,

retire at forty—

a stable home,

psychoanalysis for my daughter,

private school.

 

I could have married for money.

Love turned out to be a prison.

 

How could it be her,

if there was a different father? 

 

I am afraid to say it. 

 

If I could do it over again,

I would not have married.

I would not have been pregnant. 

 

It would be best

if I could go all the way back—

be born into a kinder family—

not alcoholic parents. 

 

How could it be her

if it is no longer me?

 

As a mother I know

the answer

can only be

 

“Yes, Honey, I would do it

exactly the same.”

The Knight of Pentacles

 2021 (c)

 

It is not that he is immovable.

He is responsible.

 

He is hired to guard

what others have gathered—

to consider whose labor,

whose wanting

made it so.

 

He dresses for the role—

not expression,

but recognition.

 

He knows accounts—

savings, bonds

what will be his

when the time comes.

 

He thinks of Paris—

wine, a young woman,

a weekend spent

 

But he does not go.

 He is guarding.

 

He keeps the numbers strait,

the doors locked,

his hands clean.

The King of Pentacles

 2021 (c)

He keeps champagne in his desk

for when a deal closes well.

 

Once, a deal closed early—

he took the staff kayaking

along his waterfront property.

 

He trusts the material world.

He avoids sand pits—

litigation—

prefers solid ground.

 

He trusts his body—

the sprawling home and acreage,

his kind, reliable wife,

his educated children.  

 

Everything in it’s place.

 

Don’t envy the King.

 

The wine is open—

and no one is drinking.

 

 

Egg Bodies

2009 

Lauren drew egg shaped bodies 
One thin border separated the spheres 
from white, unpopulated backgrounds. 

 
With the painstaking exactitude 
of a three-year-old who has not learned 
to use a straight edge 

 
Lauren drew lines—hair, perhaps pins, 
arrows radiating out from the boundaries. 

 
I scoured for form and function—realism, 
and could never grasp that her art, 
sprung from the body-heart, 

 
a primal architecture 
not from head. 
 
Lauren said, “This is you” 
handing Warren an egg. 
 

It was easy to assume  
the lines were a study of his beard. 

We joked about this egg—at least— 
not being bald. 

 
For weeks Lauren drew radiating eggs, 
strewing sheets throughout our apartment 
common as the repeating patterns of ferns. 

 
I imagined each was another 
portrait of Warren, 
that her wariness of his company 
was appreciation 
 

until the evening she blurted 
she didn’t want him visiting 
whenever daddy was away. 
 
Lauren upturned her bowl of salad 
over his head and giggled. 

 
Warren’s head at last 
was mimicry, not model, 
 

and her reaching out 
was in a language even I understood.