Amorak Huey

My Kink Is Distance

Sometimes in Ohio
I dream of Ohio.
Moonrise over suburb,
over cornfield, highway,
mosque, the Maumee.
I dream myself into the ditches
we once dug to drain
this swamp. Such audacity
to bend the landscape
around our bodies
and yet it’s how we live
here. So much for care-
taking. So much for all
those promises. Sometimes
the dreams are of the past
but mostly they meander
outside of time. Outside
of what’s possible. I wake
aching. My body
turned inside out
by distance,
even here.

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Amorak Huey is author of five books of poems including Mouth, out from Cornerstone Press in January 2026. Co-founder with Han VanderHart of River River Books, Huey teaches at Bowling Green State University. He is co-author with W. Todd Kaneko of the textbook Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2024).