Editor’s Note: As if in response to last week’s Binsey Poplars poem and our not knowing “what we do when we delve or hew,” this prose poem recounts a historic event detailing the consequences of our rapacious “hewing.”
LOGJAM
The 1883 logjam on Michigan’s Grand River was one of the biggest in the history of logging.
Listen: one hundred fifty million feet of logs: skew and splinter thirty feet high for seven river-miles. Sky of only lightning, mouth
of only teeth, all bite and churn, thrust and spear, the kind of mess made by men who have men to clean up their messes. It rains.
Thirty-seven million tons of white pine clears its throat. Water rises. The bridges will go soon. Listen closely: underneath the knock
and clatter, the trees still sing. The song is a violence.
Amorak Huey is author of four books of poems including Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy (Sundress Publications, 2021). Co-founder with Han VanderHart of River River Books, Huey teaches in the BFA and MFA programs 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, 2nd ed., 2024) and Slash/Slash (2021), winner of the Diode Editions Chapbook Prize. Huey is a recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts, and his poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry, American Poetry Review, The Southern Review, The Missouri Review, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day series, and many other print and online journals.
