Everyone’s Inventory

Item: womb; elastic, working thermometer, no windows.

Item: child; cute as an heirloom, nude music, confirmation bias.

Items: 3 bottles of growing up; 1 empty, 2 more or less half full.

Item: pixelated face; symmetrical, no scars, but tweaked.

Item: mask; ditto.

Item: four-button coat; hand-me-down, moth holes, taken for granted.

Items: 524 books; dubbed corners, some foxing,

doodled aphorisms on endpapers.

Items: assorted love letters; origami words, unedited, antique ink.

Items: 3 orphaned door keys; grubby brass, skeletons safe in bureau drawer.

Item: box of promises; packed in peanuts, fragile, but heavy.

Items: legal documents; some intentionally left blank, some not, (shred).

Items: ordinary griefs; packed by the ounce, to plant in rows one foot apart.

Items: 2 1/2 pairs of work gloves; leather, earth stained, no wave.

Item: smart phone; screen at midnight, contacts deleted, senile.

Items: pocket poems; wadded among laundry lint.

Item: wife; cast iron and crystal, mother of daughters, comrade in arms.

Items: miscellaneous woodcarvings; signatures in blood.

Items: the else-to-do; none (or missing).

Item: breath; departed, seen on the road to Amicus.

Item: 1 body; donated to science, caloric thoughts burned away.

Item: fame; problematic, (TBD).

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Fredrick Wilbur’s poetry collections are As Pus Floats the Splinter Out and Conjugation of Perhaps. He is poetry co-editor and blogger for Streetlight Magazine. He was awarded the Stephen Meats Poetry Prize for best poem of the year by Midwest Quarterly (2018).