ELI V. RAHM — "NOCTURNE" (Issue 29)

Sugar House Review · Eli V. Rahm's "Nocturne"

NOCTURNE 

I crawl along the side of a highway because I thought I saw a

glimpse of you in a dead fox. You—every pupil. How beautiful

orange looks

when wet. In Virginia, we used to fall asleep to foxes screaming.

It’s how they find each other, you’d say, your breath—spoons

of white on the glass. To find your mate, you continued, you have

to scream. This is how I’ve learned to find you—

crouching by smoke and stench, the pull of every passing car

nearly taking me with it. The fox—newspaper at the end of the

day—crumpled.

I reach down to touch the remains, as if to carry them somewhere

they won’t be churned, all paper shreds. I hear something like a

ragged cough and the fox jumps—one-eyed, bleeding

mouth. Then, gone—back to suburban woods. Next to my feet, the

other eye. I slide this slick offering into my coat pocket.

Take a piece of you home.

ABOUT THE POET 

Eli V. Rahm is a queer writer from Virginia. Eli is the recipient of the 2023 

Mary Roberts Rinehart Poetry Award and the 2020 Joseph A. Lohman III Award 

in Poetry. They’ve attended the Berlin Writers Workshop, the Juniper Summer Writing Institute, and the Tin House Winter Workshop. Eli’s work is featured or forthcoming in Door Is a Jar, Passages North, Bellingham Review, The Cortland 

Review, and The Academy of American Poets, among others. You can find them at Elisaurus.Carrd.co.

ABOUT SUGAR HOUSE REVIEW 

We loved reading the work that we’ve published (clearly), and we want an 

opportunity to better hear our contributors. We're featuring audio recordings of 

poems from our pages, read by the poet. This an open invitation to all contributors 

from any of our issues, we were delighted to print your work, now we’re eager to 

hear it.

JENNIFER MARTELLI — "BORROWING" (Issue 29)

Sugar House Review · Jennifer Martelli's "Borrowing"

BORROWING

For years, I studied German, the tongue

rooted in the back of my mouth, thick

and unnatural for me to even say

who I was: Ich bin, I am. A crow,

omnipotent and Eurasian, lodged

in the hollow at the secret end

of my throat where a church

waited, beyond my mouth’s arched

roof bones, nave to apse, raw

and red from this scrapy language.

Ich bin! Ich bin! I am! I am! The crow

built a nest out of Berlin black locust

twigs, big enough to house a clan

of birds. When they fly out to hunt,

I’ll wear their nest as a crown.

ABOUT THE POET 

Jennifer Martelli is the author of The Queen of Queens, winner of the Italian 

American Studies Association Book Award and named a “must-read” by the

Massachusetts Center for the Book and My Tarantella, also a “must-read,” and 

finalist for the Housatonic Book Award. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The 

Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, The Tahoma Literary Review, Folio, 

Jet Fuel Review, Tab: A Journal of Poetry, and elsewhere. Jennifer Martelli has 

received fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the 

Massachusetts Cultural Council. JennMartelli.com

ABOUT SUGAR HOUSE REVIEW 

We loved reading the work that we’ve published (clearly), and we want an 

opportunity to better hear our contributors. We're featuring audio recordings of 

poems from our pages, read by the poet. This an open invitation to all contributors 

from any of our issues, we were delighted to print your work, now we’re eager to 

hear it.

HANNAH TREASURE — "MELATONIN GUMMIES, FOUR STARS" (Issue 29)

Sugar House Review · Hannah Treasure's, "Melatonin"

MELATONIN GUMMIES, FOUR STARS

These work—I take one every night instead of getting stoned.

The taste is fake strawberry, in a good way, like a snow cone.

I feel rested when I wake up, and I remember my dreams.

I only took one star off because in the last dream my husband

found out he had gotten another woman pregnant a long time ago

and it was very painful for me. To see the new little boy as

his carelessness. There wasn’t a way to express my anger

that he hadn’t prioritized our future before we’d met.

I just kept feeding the kid cereal, wondering how I’d know

when he was full.

ABOUT THE POET 

Hannah Treasure is a lecturer in the department of English at Clemson

University. She received her MFA in poetry from Brooklyn College in 2020. 

Her work appears in The Brooklyn Rail, Ghost City Review, Sonora Review, 

No Dear, Volume Poetry, and elsewhere.

ABOUT SUGAR HOUSE REVIEW 

We loved reading the work that we’ve published (clearly), and we want an 

opportunity to better hear our contributors. We're featuring audio recordings of 

poems from our pages, read by the poet. This an open invitation to all contributors 

from any of our issues, we were delighted to print your work, now we’re eager to 

hear it.

KASEY JUEDS — "CEDAR CLOSET" (Issue 29)

Sugar House Review · Kasey Jueds's, "Cedar Closet"

CEDAR CLOSET

I didn’t want to write that place

with its daughterless walls

smelling of lost forests, of bafflement.

There the moths would not.

There, the small hands

I smoothed along the boards

to quiet them.

When I pressed my limbs between

the weight of winter

coats: no door, no secret

I could find. And still

those planks with their voiceless

noise, their fevered blush

like the fur of the first dog

I loved. Darting into long grass

in the field behind the house, she’d

vanish, return. Always, then,

it was August, the end

of a road that ran straight

for miles.

I can still make

a church of my fingers

to call back the burrs

snagged in her coat. I can make

a steeple, reaching

toward untouchable blue.

But do I make that closet, the want

and gone of it, where

no one almost never—

or the field, where wind

keeps erasing

the sentence in my head: the one

that begins with winter

and ends in a kneeling

that leaves no mark on the earth.

ABOUT THE POET 

Kasey Jueds is the author of two collections of poetry, both from the University

of Pittsburgh Press: Keeper, which won the 2012 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, 

and The Thicket. She lives in a small town in the mountains of New York state 

with one human and one spotty dog.

ABOUT SUGAR HOUSE REVIEW 

We loved reading the work that we’ve published (clearly), and we want an 

opportunity to better hear our contributors. We're featuring audio recordings of 

poems from our pages, read by the poet. This an open invitation to all contributors 

from any of our issues, we were delighted to print your work, now we’re eager to 

hear it.

KIERON WALQUIST — "THE OREGON TRAIL® + ALL OF MY DEATHS" (Issue 29)

Sugar House Review · Kieron Walquist's, "The Oregon Trail + All of My Deaths"

THE OREGON TRAIL + ALL OF MY DEATHS

An accidental buckshot, broken leg [couldn’t bother to bandage the

bullet-hole or change clothes], cholera, dehydration, dysentery, the

devil I’m sure dulling the disk, exhaustion, fever, foes, the fire I forgot

to gut until I was engulfed, greed, grief, the goddamn horse taking

off, the horse-kick, the humor in dying infinitely, insufficient funds,

the jaws of a rattlesnake, bad jar of beans, karma, knife-wound,

lash of sunlight, lily of the valley, measles, mosquitos, nightmares,

the promise of Oregon, an oasis being my heat-pickled brain, the

pioneer life, quarrels, questions, quitting, risks, my toothpick

schooner riding over rocks, river crossings, starvation, stupid shit,

typhoid, terrible luck, twisted lung, unarmed + under-fire, ushered

again into violence, vanity, vengeance, very wet-behind-the-ears, the

weather, want, wishful thinking, X marking the spot, yes when it was

no, yellow flowers, the zigzag of the computer mouse, zooming over

information, zero communication, your belief in me.

ABOUT THE POET 

Kieron Walquist (he/they) is a queer, neurospicy poet + visual artist from

mid-Missouri. He holds an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis + is

currently a PhD candidate at the University of Utah. Their work has received 

support from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Monson Arts, + 

Vermont Studio Center. LOVE LOCKS, their first chapbook, is out with 

Quarterly West. He lives in Salt Lake City.

ABOUT SUGAR HOUSE REVIEW 

We loved reading the work that we’ve published (clearly), and we want an 

opportunity to better hear our contributors. We're featuring audio recordings of 

poems from our pages, read by the poet. This an open invitation to all contributors 

from any of our issues, we were delighted to print your work, now we’re eager to 

hear it.