The first girl I ever kissed wore
cherry necklaces and swore by
numbers. Somehow, she explained
as we sat alone in her house, her
parents gone away to a movie,
our names amounted to nothing
more than a sequence of digits,
a summation of our identities, and
who we could become together. So
she added our names together, the two
of us sitting on her bed, alone in her
house with her parents gone away
to a movie. She chewed on her pen,
quietly assessing the number written
on the notepad in front of her, leaving
me to guess the meaning of her silence.
Double zeroes, maybe, or worse, I
feared, perhaps three sixes. Together
We were the Biblical beast, our future
offspring a sign of the End Times?
Instead of showing me the number,
She spoke it. She breathed it.
69
Infused by cherry wisps, it hung
like a promise in the air, radiated by
the heat of our bodies, everything
suspended,
her chest rising and falling
awaiting my response. “The year
I was born,” I answered, causing
the number to dissipate suddenly, no
more than an afterimage then, and I
wondered at the staleness filling the room
then, something rank lingering in my
mouth for as long as I remembered
the stars that predetermined the words
I was doomed to speak, every woman
since then the bearer of something precious, if only
I could make the numbers come
out right.
by Douglas Ford