What Happens When a Star Explodes
by Amorak Huey
It’s like this, right. It’s like when there’s a moment moving furniture, right, something your arms cannot contain, your fingers cannot dig into, something impossibly heavy, a dining table perhaps, a sleeper sofa whose convenience you once thought outweighed its weight but that’s true only when you’re not standing at the top of a steep flight of stairs losing the battle against gravity, your muscles tense and quivering and giving way, there’s this moment, right, when your body knows you’ve already lost but the end hasn’t happened yet and in that moment all the weight goes away, the world goes away, leaving nothing, but there is light, only light, light, lightness, and then, only then, the fall.
Amorak Huey is author of four books of poems including Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy (Sundress Publications). Co-founder with Han VanderHart of River River Books, Huey teaches at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. He also is co-author with W. Todd Kaneko of the textbook Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury).