Poetry / Justin Carter 

:: See You In The Lobby ::

	
When Diana Taurasi says to the ref
see you in the lobby, I think

about when she put her fist 
through a door after a playoff loss

& how, if she could, she’d do
the same to the officials. It’s a shame

the phrase contains the connotations
of violence because otherwise

it’d be such a beautiful thing
to say: see you in the lobby

of my dreams, see you in the lobby
of that hotel we stayed at

the night of our wedding,
how we fell asleep before we even

put the jalapeno corn away,
& the last time I saw someone

in a lobby—your parents, at the hospital, 
beckoning them in to see our child.

From the writer

:: Account ::

This poem comes from my man­u­script Lat­er­als, a col­lec­tion that uses sports as the lens through which it inves­ti­gates things like love, par­ent­ing, death. I grew up lov­ing sports and part of me always want­ed to be a sports writer, though I went the “get an MFA” route. But there’s not a lot of mon­ey in acad­e­mia and at some point I found a paid sports blog­ging gig as a side job while I pur­sued my PhD and slow­ly that just kind of became my main thing, until I ulti­mate­ly left acad­e­mia. I didn’t write any poems for maybe three years until it seemed like I might be gone from that world for­ev­er, and then at some point, the words just showed back up, and my poems kept tend­ing toward using sports as its way of under­stand­ing my life. I think work­ing a day job where I’m always writ­ing about oth­er peo­ple, about ath­letes and games, has made me veer in the com­plete oppo­site direc­tion in my cre­ative work, to dig deep­er into the per­son­al, but told through this par­tic­u­lar frame.

Justin Carter is the author of Bra­zos (Belle Point Press, 2024). His poems have appeared in Bat City Review, DIAGRAM, Sono­ra Review, and oth­er spaces. Orig­i­nal­ly from the Texas Gulf Coast, Justin cur­rent­ly lives in Iowa and works as a sports writer and editor.