Space Junk by Joshua Lillie

They took away the stars.

They took away the way the crow flies. 

They took the flowers from our mouths and charged us

for a vase. 

They gave us flights of stairs that move 

so we won’t have to, radios that hiss like rustled leaves

so we can keep our windows closed. 

They gave us under-the-sun assembly lines

of coping mechanisms to siphon the beauty

from what little’s left. Every shooting star

is a mis-adventured drone, every meteor shower a sparkfly

in the space-junk of test rocket debris.

I used to joke

why go outside when the window in my pocket

looks down into all the others? but now I know

the comfort that window sheds is a bow on top

of the fear the outside

casts. Now I know the wildness

I sense in dreams is a yearning 

for the crispness that the murals of landscapes lack.

The only light pollution I recall was static in a window

I couldn’t tell was closed but for the glare.

___________

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.