11/8
Sonnets From Other Lives: Hope


Everybody says—What were you thinking?
As if thinking was in any way involved.
My excuse of course was we were drinking,
but there was a much more primal force involved:
The organism’s urge to replicate.

I’d told myself I’m not the kind of girl
who carries around condoms on a date,
& for that I’ve got the wages of my sin
growing in my sorry uterus.
What made me think that I would not give in
to the atavistic voice of human lust?
For all my meditations on the soul,
I never gave a thought to birth control.