Self-Portrait as an Aging Clown Going for an Evening Run on the Summer Solstice by Amorak Huey

Editorial intern Taylor Favour on today's bonus poem:  In “Self-Portrait as an Aging Clown Going for an Evening Run on the Summer Solstice," poet Amorak Huey provides midlife meditations on the body, love, and the postal-service realities of adulthood.

Self-Portrait as an Aging Clown Going for an Evening Run on the Summer Solstice

Runner-up in a competition against myself—
blame these oversized shoes, this rubber nose
I’ve forgotten to remove. I’ve been losing
all my weight then regaining it. Better
than losing my mind, which is a one-way street
like this block where we’ve settled,
continue settling. What’s
the word for _____? For _____?
Most of my unfinished romance novels
are about you. Well, some of them.
My calves are cramping. All the neighbors
are mowing. It’s light so late,
we’ve had exactly enough rain,
we moved here for just such greening,
expecting meaning in how we shape
nature to fit between our sidewalks,
shape ourselves to fit somewhere,
anywhere. Someone has been writing you,
I’ve been sending the letters back
before you get home each day
marked no such address. I’ve learned
to say yes only to things I’ll later regret.
The moral of the story is not every story
has a moral. Or is it that not every moral
has a story. A season is almost over
the day it begins; yes, the implications
are unsettling, but what the hell,
can’t stop now, too far from home,
going out always was easier than coming back.

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Amorak Huey, a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, is author of the poetry collections Ha Ha Ha Thump (Sundress 2015) and Boom Box (Sundress forthcoming in 2019) as well as the chapbooks The Insomniac Circus(Hyacinth Girl 2014) and A Map of the Farm Three Miles from the End of Happy Hollow Road (Porkbelly 2016). He is also co-author with W. Todd Kaneko of the textbook Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury 2018) and teaches writing at Grand Valley State University in Michigan.