February 2025
Frederick Wilbur
frederickwilbur@gmail.com
frederickwilbur@gmail.com
Bio Note: A valuable aspect of anyone's writing life is reading and as co-editor of poetry for an online magazine, I read a lot of poetry. I read poetry submissions for our weekly posts and dozens for our annual contest. I invite you to take a read at Streetlightmag.com for its poetry and its other features: blogs, essays, short fiction, and its artwork.
Situational Disorientation
You say goodbye to each passing October
like crossing off items on an else-to-do list,
and power walk toward a winter of cats,
orange not your favorite color.
Your boyfriend chases after you
in winged sandals and helmet
(never mind the golden glow),
hides messages you mistake as love letters
in sock drawers, encrypted files,
wallpapered closets,
behind cheap Picasso prints in the hall
believing that you’ll find them
before leaving on Amtrak’s Southern Crescent:
all of them say please take me with you.
You pack your shadow into a secret compartment
of a hollowed-out book, the blue ticket
odd in the saving of dollar bills,
but you never go anywhere.
He has forgiven you constantly
since that first kiss smacked
of loneliness
years ago.
The Echo
Waking in recesses of dark, sweat- soaked
by dream’s difficult labor:
the farm-boy’s shout smacks the silence
like a shotgun’s report.
I cannot know his backyard games,
his rite of fears, his teenage lusts,
but the odds of returning to sleep
are too heroic against me:
I throw off suffocating ghost-sheets.
Should that youngster be awake
carousing at such an hour,
his begging like a sliver of memory?
Without concern, his troubling voice horns again.
Again, his hounds argue
in confusion along the bottomland
to scare up all my guilts:
my son, my drowned promise, cannot answer.
Should that boy wake his fist of dogs
to remind me of my desperations?
Does he presume moonlit waters
glitter for him or do they mislead him
with an invincible faith?
I rise hearing in anger August’s static:
the rub of skunks between joists, June bugs
buzzbombing invisible screens.
Though I do not cry out, adrenalin comes prickling:
the air lies dead like pollen on a pond.
Finally, flood waters recede,
leave a tangle of debris at high water mark.
That boy’s chance call has pumped my heart dry.
Roadkills
On interstate shoulder, the doe, crumpled
in blood and bloat, lies in past tense.
Her head is thrown back in abandon,
eyes once agate, now black holes.
Opossums, raccoons, squirrels, turtles.
Another mile, a hawk’s wing begs to fly—
flag of defiance in fluffled defeat,
aspiration wrung out. She is grounded
into forgotten among roadside weeds.
Snakes, songbirds, toads, lizards, beetles, bobcats.
Abused women fail to escape
near-death experiences, their terror intact,
crashing into the dead end of he said.
Ambulances are always rushing somewhere else.
By parkway curb through urban neighborhoods,
pages of paperback biographies lift
with each passing shock wave
as if to plead some dignity for debris.
Editor's Note: If this poem(s) moves you please consider writing to the author (email address above) to say what it is about the poem you like. Writing to the author is what builds the community at Verse Virtual. It's important. -JL