Our presence here silences
the sounds we came to hear.
Chases the animals
we set out to join
in our shared hunger.
What we thought the moon
is not the moon.
Our first night together;
already the end of us
written in spaces we don’t know
how to fill: emptiness
where birdsong should be.
The Forest of a Million Trees Goes Quiet as We Walk
Amorak Huey is author of five books of poems including Mouth, out from Cornerstone Press in 2026. Co-founder with Han VanderHart of River River Books, Huey teaches at Bowling Green State University. He is co-author with W. Todd Kaneko of the textbook Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2024).