Peter Rostovsky © 2025
by Bill Rector
F. Scott Fitzgerald Isn’t In. Please Leave
A Message.
Buttercup may not bray Latin in the barn at 3 a.m., but even a donkey might swish her rough tail at the sting of timor mortis. Blue whales bell the bottommost depths of the Marianas Trench like sunken buoys. Red-eye submariners ceilinged by Arctic ice can’t sleep for the thrumming in their skulls.
Where was I?
Even a bit of flesh and blood as minute as a mosquito may be troubled by the flight of time, especially if the blood swelling its belly is yours or mine… perhaps the pest remembers playing hide and seek as a pupa with bubbles in a ditch… wonders where the search for blood has led it…
the usual whining...
the mosquito zeroes in. I swat my head. Feeling better about things, the mosquito dives again
Bill Rector, former editor of The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine, is author of Lost Moth (Chapbook Prize Winner, Epiphany Magazine, 2017); Biography Of A Name (Unsolicited Press, 2018); Brief Candles, (Prolific Press, 2018); Two Worlds, (White Knuckle Press); and Hats Are The Enemy Of Poetry (Finishing Line Press, 2021).