Poetry By Jo Angela Edwins

Joseph Gage CC




Wind Phone

for my mother

Did you get my message?
I left it for you in a dream
in which I ran half-dressed from the house
to wave you back as you drove away,
but it didn’t work. I had thought you had
been dead for years, but everyone we knew
admitted at last that they’d heard from you--
picture postcards, late-night phone calls,
short visits for tea and reassurance.
I had begun to think you never cared for me.
I had looked for you everywhere, dear diamond
dropped in a field of brown weeds. 
Some days I could not bring myself to stand.
My shoes lay sideways, useless, filled
with baked clay. Then, at last, there you were,
stopping by my house, its sad eaves drooping,
and you saw me in a window, and you waved,
then turned your wheels back toward a place
distant from me, and my heavy feet
bled on gravel as I lumbered in your
disappearing direction. What I shouted,
what I knew you could not hear:
You are the ache in my throat.
Am I a skip in your still beating heart?
Am I everything you wanted me to be?
___

NOTE: Wind phones are disconnected phone booths placed in spaces where people are invited to speak to dead loved ones what they could not say before the loss.

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​Jo Angela Edwins has published poems in over 100 journals and anthologies. She is author of the collection A Dangerous Heaven (2023) and the chapbooks Play (2016) and Bitten (2025). She has received awards from Winning Writers, Poetry Super Highway, the Jasper Project, and the SC Academy of Authors. She teaches at Francis Marion University in Florence, SC, and is the poet laureate of the Pee Dee region of South Carolina.