I’ve been asked to create a Where to Begin page for my poetry. Good idea!
Here are the top 10 poems by Jill Szoo Wilson based on website views over the years, public response at poetry readings, and generous feedback from readers like you.
I wanted to let you know that I’ve also been writing over on Substack. That publication is called Necessary Whispers, and it’s a bit more casual than what I tend to post here.
I just began a small series called 20-Today. The idea is simple: I write one poem or observation each day while I’m in motion — at the gym or on a trail — and I stop at twenty minutes.
That’s the only rule.
After spending much of this past year writing through heavier subjects, I’m turning toward something lighter. Writing simply for the joy of it!
If you’re curious, I’d love to have you join me there.
I couldn’t find an artist for this piece. I’d be happy to attribute it upon discovery.
He arrived early.
He always arrived early. It gave him time to rehearse the version of himself he planned to be. The diner sat off the highway with wood paneling darkened by decades of smoke and winter. A Budweiser mirror hung behind the counter. The jukebox near the bathrooms blinked in patient pinks and greens, waiting for quarters.
He chose the booth against the window. The vinyl was cracked in two places and repaired with strips of clear tape that had yellowed over time. He slid in, set his keys on the table, and checked his watch. The red numbers glowed briefly against his wrist before fading back to black.
7:42.
He trusted the red glow. It felt decisive.
The waitress, whose hair was sprayed into a shape that both defied and paid tribute to gravity, poured coffee into a thick white mug without asking. “You waiting on someone?” she said, already knowing the answer.
“Yeah,” he replied, with a smile he practiced in rearview mirrors.
He adjusted the sleeve of his Members Only jacket. He pressed the edge of the paper placemat flat with his palm. The placemat advertised a local car dealership and smelled faintly of ink and grease. Outside the window, the parking lot held his car and one pickup truck that had been there since he arrived.
He imagined her walking in.
He imagined the bell over the door ringing once. He imagined not looking up immediately. He imagined letting her cross the room before lifting his eyes, as if her arrival were incidental and not the center of his evening.
He lifted the mug. The coffee was hot enough to require patience. Steam rose and vanished.
The door did not open.
7:58.
Maybe she was late.
Traffic collects where it pleases. A woman might linger at her kitchen counter, turning a ring around her finger. She might rehearse the first sentence and discard it. The evening could still be intact, only delayed.
The door did not open.
The first flicker of heat came when the clock above the counter clicked to 8:00, and the jukebox changed its lights. He felt it low in his chest, the way a swallowed word lingers. He realized he was counting the seconds between passing headlights in the parking lot. One. Two. Three. The gap stretched longer each time, like the space between lightning and thunder when the storm is blowing away.
He folded his hands on the table. He pressed his thumb against the rim of the mug to steady a tremor he refused to acknowledge.
The booth across from him remained empty.
The fire began quietly.
It gathered itself first, narrow and deliberate, like a man straightening his tie before stepping into a room. The flame rose from the center of him in a single, disciplined line, bright without frenzy. It kept its posture. It traced the length of his body with precision, as though even humiliation preferred form. The vinyl held. The napkin lay flat. The sugar caddy caught the light and gave nothing away. The fire belonged to him and to no other surface.
He did not look around.
He knew what it meant.
It was the heat of being visible without being chosen. It was the temperature of a man seated in plain sight while the woman he waited for occupied some other evening entirely.
He slipped his hand into the pocket of his jacket and felt the soft crush of a Marlboro pack. He considered lighting one. He imagined the smoke blending with whatever rose from him. He left the pack where it was. It might smell more like nicotine and less like Stetson.
8:17.
He could leave.
He could stand, slide a five-dollar bill beneath the saucer, and nod at the waitress as though something had come up. He could step into the night before anyone calculated how long he had been there. He could revise the story later. He could say he changed his mind first.
Instead, he stayed.
He let the fire narrow him.
It burned through the scene he had rehearsed on the drive over. The way she would tuck her hair behind her ear. The way she would say his name as if it surprised her. The way the first silence between them would feel charged instead of awkward. Each imagined moment flared and collapsed, bright and brief.
The waitress wiped down the counter with a cloth that smelled faintly of bleach and Ranch dressing. A man in a trucker cap fed a quarter into the jukebox and selected a song that crackled before finding its melody.
The booth across from him held its vacancy with composure.
He understood then that absence makes an entrance of its own. It sits across from you and asks nothing. It leaves you to supply every explanation.
The heat climbed higher.
He felt it behind his eyes, where pride waits. He felt it in his throat, where apologies gather. He felt it in the small, involuntary tightening of his jaw.
He closed his eyes.
Behind his eyelids, color pressed and thinned, as if light were searching for a seam. The closed door no longer mattered. The parking lot no longer held narrative weight. What remained was the outline of himself, suspended in brightness, and the steady recognition that nothing outside him required explanation.
The fire thinned slowly, like steam from cooling coffee.
He opened his eyes.
He lifted the mug and drank what remained. The coffee had cooled into the color of old pennies. A bill lay beneath the saucer like a quiet offering. He stood and drew his palms down the front of his jacket, smoothing it as though pressing the last ember flat.
The bell above the door rang when he pushed it open. Just once. “Yes,” he murmured. “That’s right.”
The night received him in its thin winter air. Gasoline, frost, distant highway. His breath moved cleanly now.
Inside the diner, nothing smoldered. The booth remained intact. The coffee cup cooled into porcelain silence.
The ash had settled elsewhere.
It lined his lungs. It sifted softly behind his ribs. It marked the place where waiting once stood.
He crossed the parking lot lighter by one imagined future.
Sorrow rarely storms the gates. It prefers a smaller entrance— a match struck against porcelain, that sulfurous whisper before light takes shape.
The candle stands upright in its brass throat, ivory, almost innocent, its surface smooth as a held breath. You light it for reasons that feel reasonable— ambience, perhaps, or the softness that forgives a room its hard edges.
The flame gathers itself slowly, a petal of fire opening and closing with each exhale in the house. It leans into drafts you cannot feel, tilts its bright head as though listening.
At first nothing changes. The wax remains sculpted, cool-boned and pale. The wick, a slender spine, holds its posture bravely.
But look closer.
There is a darkening at the tip— a quiet charring, the black bead forming like a thought you would rather not finish. It glows from within, red as an ember hiding in its own ash.
The heat loosens the body of the candle. Not all at once— never with spectacle. A thin gloss appears at the rim, a tremor of liquidity. Then a slow descent: wax turning to shine, shine turning to droplet, droplet to a small translucent lake cupping the flame.
You watch.
The surface quivers whenever the flame inhales. Tiny tides lap against the unmoving wall. A fragrance of warmed paraffin settles into the curtains, into your sleeves, into the open mouth of the room.
Minutes pass without declaring themselves. There is no visible subtraction, no chunk torn away. The candle appears steadfast, nearly identical to the candle it was.
Yet the wick is shortening in increments too modest for pride. Each second takes a grain. Each breath a filament.
Sorrow proceeds this way.
It does not alter your reflection all at once. It warms you from the inside until something structural begins to soften.
You still answer the door. You rinse the glass. You fold the towel along its old creases. The day goes on wearing its ordinary clothes.
Meanwhile— inside the brass holder— there is a geography forming: ridges of cooled drips, stalactites hardened mid-fall, a white valley carved around the dwindling core.
The flame continues its patient labor, unaware of clocks. It has only one task: to be itself, to consume what holds it upright.
From moment to moment nothing seems different. The room remains the room. The table remains the table. Your hands remain your hands.
And yet—
Hours have thinned the column. The wick, once vertical, bends inward, a tired reed in shallow water. The molten pool deepens. The walls cave gently toward the center as if listening for news.
You glance away. You glance back. Still, it burns.
You could swear it will burn forever.
But eventually you notice the brass plate shining through where ivory once stood. A shallow basin of cooled wax holds the fossil of flame— a curled black thread leaning against its own exhaustion.
Sorrow leaves such evidence.
No crash. No shattered pane. Only the quiet arithmetic of something becoming less while appearing the same.
You cannot say when the candle crossed from whole to almost gone.
You only know that at some unnoticed hour the light you trusted was busy turning itself into absence.
Spring does not arrive in ribbons. It comes with a throat full of weather.
The sky lowers itself until rooftops seem to hold it up. Rain begins without ceremony— a rehearsal for drowning that never quite succeeds.
On the oak’s blackened spine a squirrel emerges, fur slicked to its quick, astonished body. It pauses as though the world has just been repainted mid-sentence.
Green— not the polite green of greeting cards, but the kind wrung from the earth by pressure.
Grass leans forward, fluorescent with rumor. Moss burns along the stones. Even the bark darkens into something nearly blue.
The squirrel descends headfirst, a punctuation mark with claws, tail arched like a question the storm declines to answer.
Water pearls along its whiskers. It blinks, and the yard rearranges itself. Every leaf appears newly sworn in. Every puddle holds a duplicate sky shivering with revision.
Somewhere thunder practices authority. The squirrel does not applaud.
It runs— a brief streak of umber against electric green— then stops again, as if suspecting that sight itself has molted.
What has changed? The tree remains a tree. The fence, a fence. Yet color has stepped forward and declared independence.
The storm insists. The earth complies.
And the squirrel, small curator of the soaked morning, presses its paws into the vivid grass as though testing whether the brightness will stain.
Jill Szoo Wilson 