'Guzzle' by Amorak Huey

 
 

There’s a saying about the wisdom of being drunk in a small boat.

There’s another about sex under a full moon, possibly also on a small boat.

Or is it sex with an ex? Or breakup sex? Or a bottle of Boone’s Farm Kountry Kwencher.

You can’t believe it’ll be that bad. Until you’re puking over the side of a small boat.

1989, her driveway. She said we were ruining our friendship. She was right.

At Scott’s lakehouse in Pell City, she stayed ashore. It was, after all, a small boat.

My favorite summer: the year I worked at a bait shop. Learned to talk like a fisherman.

Didn’t write a word. Got a good tan and my first muscles, from dragging around small boats.

A question of ethics: When you break up with someone, should you be honest about why?

What if it isn’t very nice, or makes you look bad? It’s a long way from here to a small boat.

Ghazal, I’m told, is Arabic for “talking to women.” The couplets should be linked, like couples.

They should also be detachable units. Like, for instance, a series of small boats.

If I said I was never very good at talking to women, I would want you to think me a liar.

I once drank a bottle of wine while nightfishing. The story ends like that, in a small boat

in the dark – I’m breaking the rules here; detachment isn’t as easy as it sounds –

where was I? Oh, yes: in the moonless dark, moaning her name from the bottom of a small boat.

"Guzzle" appeared in Gargoyle 56 (2010)

'Short History of the American South' by Amorak Huey

 
 

                    “Blood where the sky has opened.”

 – Jorie Graham

“You may bury my body, ooh

down by the highway side

So my old evil spirit

can catch a Greyhound bus and ride”

 – Robert Johnson

Up early. Water level low enough to walk

a hundred yards toward horizon: mud flats

crack and squelch underfoot. No one

                                      else is here

this morning. Unfamiliar sun awaits,

hungry dark lingers against gulf’s goodbye kiss,

last girl in the dance hall, first one

to meet your eye. A wink is a promise

and a threat: follow or sit down.

In this part of the world we are never

alone and this is not my story.

How many songs before you understand

why a body must keep moving?

That when you stop, you die. This is said

of certain sharks, though it might be untrue –

but we do all of us sense blood. Imagine:

single drop: one million gallons of saltwater. Still,

there is nothing evil in this world –

your chances

of being divine so small as to be invisible –

                           to peel back

what is known about the visible

requires a sort of wisdom,

an awareness of danger – you find yourself

in this spot where the last rivers end

and sky folds into ocean –

closer & closer, then farther away.

"Short History of the American South" appeared in Blue Earth Review 8.2 (Spring 2010).

'Sept. 11, 2004' by Amorak Huey

  
  
For a while, in the newsroom, we stopped

using words like “bomb” and “slaughter”

in sports headlines. We complained

less about micro-managing editors,

weak coffee, system crashes,

incompetence in the composing room,

we pitched in and made our deadlines.

We felt like, no, not quite a family,

but a team, at least. We looked around and were glad

no one in this room believed

in anything with enough fury

to shave his earthly body clean

and plunge us all headlong into the milky fire.

It was an exciting time. We did not pity the planet,

we felt renewed with possibility, knowing

all our best love stories

have a backdrop of crisis, calamity, cholera.

We counted our blessings,

counted our fingers and toes,

counted ourselves lucky

to survive, we felt proud

we were first to see this date as the proper noun

it would become, we were responsible

for its becoming, we were patriotic

because we didn’t flinch

at the risen cost of gasoline. We were resilient.

We kept the Friday Doughnut Club alive, fearing

to do otherwise was to let someone else win,

all we had to do was wait

for time to pass, for a holiday, even a somber one

the kind marked with a slow parade

and black crepe paper,

to be born in tragedy’s muck. Three years,

turns out, suffices for most of us. We made love

and war, we had babies due in June,

we miscarried on Thanksgiving,

football on TV downstairs and our future

bleeding into a cold toilet one purple clot at a time,

our bodies helpless with cramps.

There’s more than one anniversary today.

Twenty years ago in Leicester, England,

before that Monday’s first cup of coffee was gone,

someone unlocked DNA’s inner chamber,

uncovering the unique self

written in that knotted helix,

the double strand that determines

guilt or innocence, that decides before birth

whether we are strong enough

to live in the first place

or to meet death with the angry word

of god burning like jet fuel on our tongues.

"Sept. 11, 2004" appeared in Crab Orchard Revew 13.1 (Winter/Spring 2008).

'I Give You Back' by Joy Harjo

3 Tubes of Muriel Rukeyser

'Super Moon' by Neil de la Flor

FYI #1:       This is the moon, not the sun, nor an imposter.

FYI #2:      That is my shadow to the left of the landing strip of light.

FYI #3:      Light travels at the speed of kissing.

FYI #4:      In lieu of the super moon, we mooned the moon.

FYI #5:       We mooed, too.

FYI #6:      Where is the moon when I’m in school?

FYI #7:       The periapsis is the shortest distance between my body from one of the foci of his elliptical orbit.

FYI #8:      Even though he is the apoapsis to my periapsis, we both end in s.

FYI #9:      I want to lick the photons off the super moon so that I can dream of fire-breathing dragons again.

FYI #10:     When I sleep, I’m a dragon.

FYI #11:     I’m also a queen.

FYI #12:     He said we should make an offering to the super moon and then he hugged me like a big gay football player might after winning the Super Bowl.

FYI #13:     I love the trajectory of madness.

FYI #14:     Before he jumped in, he took off his pretty hat.

Olga Broumas, 1988

http://poetry.arizona.edu/promotion/2011/07/im-still-listening