I’m driving through the pinkness of an Ohio sunrise
where everything around me is Ohio
bathed in pink light & somehow
looks exactly like the Ohio
someone who has never been to Ohio
imagines Ohio to be & the cornfields
are just where they should be
this time of year. This is how life goes:
every moment a simulacrum of itself, 
every season on a loop
back toward itself, every place 
a snowglobed version of that same place,
nothing so unique as we’d hoped,
not even love. I’m driving 
neither toward you nor away.
The distance between us holds steady.
It’s amazing we found each other in the first place —
think how a bee carries pollen
from one singular tiger lily 
on the side of a highway in Ohio
to another a mile away, or miles,
& for the rest of their time blooming on this planet
those two flowers are swollen with each other,
the possibility of each other,
& that possibility, it turns out, is enough 
to sustain all of it — each stem, pistil, petal
stretching open each morning 
to drink deep the pink-lit dew.

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Author’s note: I moved to Ohio, of all places, a year ago. Moving at this age (I’m older than I think I am) has me thinking about distance and disconnection, about toward and away, about what we carry with us. Our kids are suddenly out of the house. Someone else lives in the house where they grew up. None of this has anything to do with this poem, or it has everything to do with the poem. Since the move, I’ve been trying to pay particular attention to Ohio, to what Ohio looks like, to what Ohio represents in my life — I think this is a way of holding on. It’s a kind of love.

Amorak Huey is author of four books of poems including Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy (Sundress, 2021). Co-founder with Han VanderHart of River River Books, Huey teaches at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. He also is co-author with W. Todd Kaneko of the textbook Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2024).