On the Way to the Buffalo Farm
I paged through a skateboarding magazine
while my stepdad’s daughter read aloud from a book
on the American Buffalo. She said the natives used every part,
filed the horn tips into arrowheads, stretched the tendons
into bow strings, even used their droppings as kindling
and imitated their grunt in ceremony. As an adult, that’s what I do
with the dollar, snipping the empty ends off toothpaste tubes
and scraping the remnants out with the brush, emptying the coins
from my pocket into a drawer at the end of the day,
transferring residuals into savings accounts and taping
the president’s faces whole again when the bills wear and tear.
My stepdad drove us up because my mother always talked
about getting a herd tattooed on her ankle, a mother
leading three small calves. Instead she got his name in cursive
on her wrist and eventually got that covered with flowers and vines.
Only two buffalo were on the farm when we arrived,
in a large corral on a hill. The main attraction turned out to be
the restaurant just off the road. At the table next to ours, a father
recommended the Rocky Mountain Oysters. My stepdad nodded,
said of course, I’ve had them many times before.
Joshua Lillie is a bartender in Tucson, Arizona. His poems have appeared in Stanchion Zine, Wildscape Literary Journal, Valley Verbomania Literary Review, and Sonora Review. He is the author of the chapbook Small Talk Symphony, to be published by Finishing Line Press in fall 2025, and 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.