Amorak Huey & W. Todd Kaneko
Slash in Paradise
Every song is a landscape with broken glass,
every heart a crying out—the first sound
anyone ever makes is a broken promise.
The lyrics come later because words are easy:
all smoke / fumes on the way out of town.
Leaving is how I apologize
for every morning I wake with my hands
on someone else’s skin.
O lead me into your Eden, your city of angels, your happily-ever-after.
Amorak Huey, a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, is author of the poetry collections Seducing the Asparagus Queen (Cloudbank Books, 2018), Ha Ha Ha Thump (Sundress, 2015) and Boom Box (Sundress, forthcoming 2019), as well as two chapbooks. He is co-author of the textbook Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2018) and teaches at Grand Valley State University.
W. Todd Kaneko is the author of The Dead Wrestler Elegies (Curbside Splendor 2014), co-author of Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury Academic 2018), and his poems and prose can be seen in many journals and anthologies. A Kundiman fellow, he is co-editor of the online literary journal Waxwing and lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan where he teaches creative writing at Grand Valley State University.
Return to January 2019 Edition
Every song is a landscape with broken glass,
every heart a crying out—the first sound
anyone ever makes is a broken promise.
The lyrics come later because words are easy:
all smoke / fumes on the way out of town.
Leaving is how I apologize
for every morning I wake with my hands
on someone else’s skin.
O lead me into your Eden, your city of angels, your happily-ever-after.
Amorak Huey, a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, is author of the poetry collections Seducing the Asparagus Queen (Cloudbank Books, 2018), Ha Ha Ha Thump (Sundress, 2015) and Boom Box (Sundress, forthcoming 2019), as well as two chapbooks. He is co-author of the textbook Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2018) and teaches at Grand Valley State University.
W. Todd Kaneko is the author of The Dead Wrestler Elegies (Curbside Splendor 2014), co-author of Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury Academic 2018), and his poems and prose can be seen in many journals and anthologies. A Kundiman fellow, he is co-editor of the online literary journal Waxwing and lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan where he teaches creative writing at Grand Valley State University.
Return to January 2019 Edition