Three Poems by Joshua Lillie

JUNK DRAWER

Mom said when you feel depressed,
clean the fridge. Organize the junk drawer. Spring clean.
I’ve rearranged the drawers to extinction.
There’s no junk left. The nuts and bolts
now live in their respective mason jars
and have graduated from drawer to the out and open,
up on the shelves where I call them modern art.
Dust gathers on the lids the same way time makes dust
of my mind, in a process I don’t even try to keep hidden
anymore. At Goodwill after my dog died, my sister called
and asked if I’d already made a Goodwill pile.
Devoid of clutter, I stalk the aisles of other’s grief
to look for trinkets to remind me
of mine. Mom said when your teeth fall out in a dream
to remember where you dropped them,
and when you wake up go there for clues
of where you might’ve lost something for real.

*

CLEAN BREAK

My first puzzle was a wooden map of the United States.
The states were the pieces, their names stamped on top,

and into the spaces where they fit, their capitals. To this day
I recall, almost reflexively, each state’s capital.

Growing up in Arizona but never crossing the border,
I was curious as a child why we didn’t spend more time at the beach.

I asked my grandma once, while pointing at the blankness
beneath our state, why don’t you ever take me to the beach?

She laughed because that’s Mexico, not an ocean.
But that only left me with broader questions.

Like well then what’s above Montana? Are there wooden maps
of everywhere? Where do I find the rest of the puzzles?

The next weekend she gifted me a paper map of the world.
I taped it by my bed and throughout elementary school I’d fall asleep

memorizing oceans. I put pins in the middles of the largest ones
and imagined wars between tankers and whales happening so far away

and far beneath us that they’d escaped my history books.
Later on I overheard a rumor that one day an earthquake

would snap California off the continent and it would drift
into the Pacific. I envisioned a clean break from the state lines

of Nevada and Arizona, the ocean rushing toward us
like through a slip’n’slide in a water park commercial.

That night I moved the pin I’d placed in the middle of the Pacific
between East and me one inch closer, in the hopes that Arizona

might have an ocean after all.

*

HEART-SHAPED HEART

Mom taught me young to scissor a heart face from a photograph,
in a way that showed my grandmother had taught her too when
she was a girl. She bent the photo but not so much to crease it,
then began cutting in a half-heart motion, one arching letter C
that drooped into a crook. This or you eyeball the heart shape flat
on the film. This way, though, you might have to trim the oblong
heart to fit more firmly in the locket. As a kid, I first closed
the dog’s face into mine, then when it ran away, the cat’s.
Then when the cat ran away, the rabbit’s that we rescued to
replace them. When the rabbit escaped, I fashioned a heart from
my grandmother’s face, and when she died, my mother’s. Years ago,
the clasp snapped and the cover went missing, so around my neck
my mother’s face was always visible. Eventually the chain snapped
too. For years I carried the small unshielded silver heart in my pocket
where her face was hidden again. In one box, I kept the photos
with loved one’s faces hearted away, in another, the heart-
shaped faces of pets and parents come and gone. To kids today,
one box won’t make sense without the other. Someone’s great grand-
mother will need to explain why we carried these faces around our necks,
why we held so tight the photos of the bodies with hearts where god
intended the face to be.

*

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). In 2024, he was a finalist for the Jack McCarthy Book Prize Contest from Write Bloody Publishing. In his free time, he enjoys searching for lizards with his wife and cat.