All the Days Behind

It’s say two weeks after the 1980s become the 1990s and holy shit. We don’t know it but we’ve already heard what will remain our favorite music forever. I’m slouching on a thrift-store sofa in an off-campus apartment in the shadow of the football stadium of an SEC school. So, January, but like, South January, which means it’s been raining. Someone’s hung t-shirts over the window in place of blinds. We’re burning incense from the mall. I’m watching the eyes of this girl who I think likes me but I don’t have a lot of experience in this area. Being liked. Her eyes are I guess you’d call them blue but almost gray, too. She’s waiting for me to reach for her, I’m waiting for her to reach for me. We’re drinking Boone’s Farm right from the bottle and listening to Poison, Van Halen, like that. Just enough edge to keep us awake. What happens next? Our whole entire goddamn lives, that’s what happens, this girl and I, we finally touch each other until finally we don’t anymore and in one day in a year or so we’ll see each other for the last time, which we’ll sort of know in that moment but we’ll have no idea what last time means until much, much later. My body will carry this memory around like a discarded Pepsi bottle bobbing downriver, taking on water and losing it, cycle of submerge and surface until the river reaches some new body and all the days behind are swallowed in deeper water.

AMORAK HUEY

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