She Reaches Out Online
Purring words, poemesque
in the emoji-ed text,
she prowls in reminiscence;
her seducing kiss high
in the glycemic index of language.
Her message pleads for love once honest
when misunderstandings were laughed aside.
She bandages her wounds of emptiness
with flatterings that are old perfumes
from lavender envelopes.
What laurels memory is a sad truth:
you cannot type a reply in innocence,
as there must be honor in your silence.
Would you offend her by slight praise
as doves sing in monotones?
You were lovers with younger consequence.
Scrolling through her florid paragraphs
again and again, complication
becomes the demise of passion.
She may suffer softly by this silence
curse keenly your lack of reply,
but you cannot click send
that will surely detonate her heart:
must bury this plea in junk mail,
her pixelated image in a secured file:
knowing that the password is her name.
© Frederick Wilbur
Frederick Wilbur’s poetry collections are As Pus Floats the Splinter Out and Conjugation of Perhaps. His work appears in Appalachian Review, The Atlanta Review, Comstock Review, The Dalhousie Review, The Ekphrastic Review, The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, The Lyric, Midwest Quarterly, New Verse News, One Art: a journal of poetry, Shenandoah, The South Carolina Review, Southern Poetry Review, and The Virginia Writers Project Journal. Wilbur has written three books on architectural wood carving, many journalistic essays, and other nonfiction works. He is poetry co-editor and blogger for Streetlight Magazine. He was awarded the Stephen Meats Poetry Prize by Midwest Quarterly (2018).
The Loch Raven Review 