"My number is . . ."

    More than twenty years ago I found and admired Montana poet Sandra Alcosser's poem, "My Number" (included in Except by Nature, Graywolf, 1998) -- and I included it in a small anthology, Numbers and Faces, that I edited; (published in 2001 by the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics).  "My Number" also has more recently also been included in Strange Attractors:  Poems of Love and Mathematics  (Edited by Glaz and Growney: AK Peters/CRC Press, 2008).

My Number     by Sandra Alcosser

I’m linked with the fate of the world’s disasters 

and only have a little freedom to live or die.

VITESLAV NEZVAL

My number is small.  An hundred pounds of water,

A quart of salt.  Her digit is a garment.

I wear her like a shadow.  We judge each other,
My number and I.  She is the title.  The license.

The cash drawer.  My random number.
She protects me from myself.  She desires me.

She says she’s only one of thirty million species.
She wishes she were more than anecdotal evidence.