Stone

I pick it up as if to keep —

as if to own.

There’s delight in such

small gestures

when unexamined.

To look closely

is to see the cost of my theft —

in dirt, in blood, in bone.

Amorak Huey’s fourth book of poems is Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy (Sundress Publications, 2021). Co-author with W. Todd Kaneko of the textbook Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2018) and the chapbook Slash/Slash (Diode, 2021), Huey teaches writing at Grand Valley State University in Michigan.