Managing Editor Lisa Ampleman: When I first read this prose poem by Amorak Huey, I was floored by the nearly breathless syntax and the subtle build of rhetoric. I’d seen Huey’s work in the magazine in 2013 when I was a student editor; in his author’s note about that poem, “She Blinded Me with Molecular Nanotechnology,” Huey says that “everything I write is some kind of love poem.” That still holds true for this piece we’re publishing a little more than a decade later. Here’s to love poems, and true stories, and ars poeticas.
To hear Amorak read the poem, click below:
Ledge (ars poetica) (love poem) (true story)
When I say ledge you immediately think of falling but it’s the opposite a ledge is a thing we build into the emptiness so we have a place to stand. Of course it’s dangerous risk of death and all that what do you think being alive involves. When I say step out onto this ledge with me does it sound like I’m talking about love or do you immediately go to the implied leap after. Wait until you find out a bridge is where two ledges meet halfway. Why are you always on about the abyss. No a river isn’t any better have you ever landed on water the wrong way. You do have to watch your step it’s true. There’s room for us here for now and now is enough let us fit our bodies together let us balance our weight against each other let us hold on even as the wind rises.
Amorak Huey is author of four books of poems including Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy (Sundress Publications, 2021). Cofounder with Han VanderHart of River River Books, Huey teaches at Bowling Green State University in Ohio.
