I don’t know why I didn’t get pregnant.
How many nights in beds beside each other
did we fuck soundless. Not for pleasure,
but for men. How many sardine apartments
of minor league baseball players, hotel rooms
for road games. How easily could we
have had the same last names like the sisters
we are. Your ex-husband’s cousin
with the fastball temper. The chair he threw
across the hallway when I wouldn’t put out
anymore. Sometimes I wish I was the teen mom,
how a child can become an endpoint
to recklessness. I think we were both reaching
for an out. The last time as we were,
I met you at a game on a college field trip
where none of my new friends knew
our story pulsing beneath the billows
of a blouse you’d bought to cover
what you were afraid to show the world
yet: a curly-haired girl with weak lungs
waiting for you to press your ear close to
her choked chest and ask whatever inhabits
the stillness of a room to fill her alveoli
with years of breath. A girl you won’t want
to tell about me, about how we loved
to wade into the deepest waters and play
chicken with Poseidon. Sometimes I imagine
she’s mine, linger around the girls’ clothing racks
and try to guess what size, what style she wears
now, the feeling the first time she refuses
everything I say is cute. How sudden it will be
that she walks into the dangerous heels of our youth.