by Joshua Lillie
my wife’s coworkers ask about my poetry
and I tell them oh,
it’s slice-of-life kind of stuff.
Bird on a wire kind of stuff. They ask
but what are they about? and I tell them so,
they say that the only philosophical question
worth asking is whether or not to commit suicide.
I guess my poems are all questions
that don’t have answers yet.
and I made things awkward again.
One of them asks if I’m active
at the university poetry center and I say no,
but I know a few local poets.
We don’t really like each other much
and everyone laughs.
I tell them that all the modern poets
have cut marks on their thighs.
I tell them to look for the scars.
That maybe the old ones had them too
and it’s the skirts that got shorter.
That the ones who survive today get tattoos
over their wrists to hide the failure,
how no one’s proud of their scars anymore.
I tell them that an old poet friend once said
that every artist is either overcooked or under-easy
and that I always forget to turn the oven off.
That I used to give my poetry books to all the girls
I wanted to touch, like a preface for my hands,
and when I first met the girl
who’s now the woman I’m married to
I gave her my poems and she came to my apartment
and found me playing PlayStation,
chainsmoking drunk, and she said I really thought
you’d be more in touch with nature, then how
I took her hand and dragged her fingers
across the scars on my biggest organ and said
do you think I got these hugging a tree? just in time
before dinner arrived.
Joshua Lillie is a bartender in Tucson, Arizona. He is the author of the chapbook Small Talk Symphony (Finishing Line Press, 2025) and the collection The Outside They Built (Alien Buddha Press, 2025). He was a finalist for the 2024 Jack McCarthy Book Prize Contest from Write Bloody Publishing. In his free time, he enjoys searching for lizards with his wife and cat.