[Julie Steiner]

Hi, Alex!

As an asexual who is astonished to find herself happily married to a vigorously heterosexual man for the past thirty-one years, I am not the ideal audience for this poem. But I thought I'd let you know that I'm puzzled by several things here, in case it's helpful.

I'll give the narrator a pass on using "love" interchangeably with "lust," since that's pretty traditional.

"just time enough to scan silhouette" — This sounds like a Tontoism for the sake of meter, but I can't see why, since the meter would actually be smoother with an unstressed syllable between "scan" and "silhouette." What's going on there?

The word "fête" seems off to me. I wouldn't characterize typical club activities such as buying an attractive stranger a drink as fêting that person. Throwing someone a party with lots of other people, all there to honor someone's birthday or retirement, sure. But a fête is a collective celebration of one person, not just one person expressing appreciation for another.

I also don't think "fecund" is the right word, despite the alliteration. "Nubile," maybe, which refers to sexual attractiveness but not necessarily to fertility. I have trouble picturing the relevance of fecundity in a nightclub setting. Few men in a nightclub are there in search of the ideal vessel and nourisher for their future offspring, and their delight in a woman's hips and breasts probably has nothing to do with the implications for efficient childbirth and milk production.

Also, fecundity quite literally makes women far LESS sexy, due to stretch marks, weight gain, a drastic diminishment of breast size, exhaustion and lack of libido, etc., etc.

I'm not sure what the distilled "insight" is. I'm guessing it's not that people who search only for shallow, transient beauty find exactly what they were looking for, and then are disappointed that the resulting relationship (and the beauty itself) is shallow and transient, since that seems pretty self-evident to me.

Who or what is "left in homes"? Insight? The formerly young women? The formerly young men? (Your comments about "twilit blights" referring to age make me briefly wonder if "left in homes" is actually referring to retirement homes, but I decided that that couldn't be what you meant.)

Finally, I don't understand why you are breaking the final line, which is the equivalent of underlining and bolding the dropped text, after a hugely dramatic, suspenseful pause. To me, the final phrase does not seem significant enough to bear that sort of extreme emphasis without seeming anticlimactic. But it's quite possibly that I'm missing a point that isn't lost on other readers.