Friday, December 22, 2017

NATASHA KESSLER-RAINS, "FEARSCAPE" (Issue 16)



FEARSCAPE

If you were my sister, you would be dead.
Your beautiful arms outstretched,
can’t say shit with a hole in your head.

If you were my sister, would you cover up already?
Plum in one hand, vetches at your gender,
a wolf at your neck. Twenty minutes of action:
they said you were asking for it, my sister.

If you were my sister, you would sit in the corner.
Your beautiful face levitating over water—
no longer a body, just a hole in the ocean,
a hole in our human backs spilling out over the floor.



ABOUT THE POET


Natasha Kessler-Rains is the author of Dismantling the Rabbit Altar. Living in Omaha, she teaches writing at area universities and works as a writing consultant for Metro Community College. Natasha also helps facilitate a community workshop called the Seven Doctors Project, a Nebraska Writers Collective program. Natasha spends her free time tying knots and reading books to her daughter.

ABOUT SUGAR HOUSE REVIEW


We’ve loved reading the work that we’ve published (clearly), so now we want an opportunity to better hear our contributors. We will feature an audio recording of a poem from one of our seven issues, read by the poet and updated every couple of weeks. 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.

AUBREE ELSE WOELBER, "TABLES" (Issue 16)



TABLES

I take the first boat out of the globe;
translate what you never said
into a pink mechanical tongue.
Use it as a paperweight.

I short-sheet your bed, practice
traps. Shoot down your apologies
with a twenty-one-gun salute.

You think my ribs are your own—
give them back before they blow
like ash & your eyes become wine:
I would drink them like I am thirsty.

I overturn the tables so they can’t be turned.
This is a clue a riddle a game.
This is how I leave you.




ABOUT THE POET

Aubree Else Woelber is an Iowa native. She is a poetry editor for the Blue River Review. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Chattahoochee Review, Bear Review, Upwrite Magazine, Ruminate, and The Flat Water Stirs: An Anthology for Emerging Nebraska Poets. She lives with her husband in Omaha.

ABOUT SUGAR HOUSE REVIEW

We’ve loved reading the work that we’ve published (clearly), so now we want an opportunity to better hear our contributors. We will feature an audio recording of a poem from one of our seven issues, read by the poet and updated every couple of weeks. 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.

JESS WILLIARD, "THE SCIENTISTS" (Issue 16)



THE SCIENTISTS

                     Bay City, Michigan

Know this: the boats you made
actually go places; hollowed clanking

of watery chambers, piping and rust
on blue for a reason. My grandfather,

painting hulls, glancing at his reflection
in portholes on Destroyer escorts,

adjusting bow thruster and trawl crane,
leaning against well walls at lunch—

I’m told I look like him, that I carry
a similar silence though sometimes he hit

my mother and gardened instead of wrote.
His hands roughed the bowed shells

of frigates before lacquering them,
perhaps even the RV Knorr, the ship

that discovered the wreck of the Titanic.
Housed the scientists who discovered

the wreck, the vessel a tinny jumble
that could have been made anywhere

but was assembled here by car mechanics
and line workers to meander through Thunder

Bay and gasp at the Atlantic. Bay City:
you are now a scrapyard, Defoe Shipbuilding

company sold and resold, soldering tools
cast into the dusking Huron Basin.

Before he died I captained the clacking
vessel of my skateboard around his block,

discovered new ways to be bored,
to owe myself to the scientists alive

at twilight before curfew that could
call me by both hull name and number,

and had enough of a particular kind
of grace to let some things stay unfound.




ABOUT THE POET

Jess Williard’s poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Third Coast, North American Review, Colorado Review, Southern Humanities Review, Sycamore Review, Lake Effect, Borderlands, Oxford Poetry, and other journals. He is from Wisconsin.

ABOUT SUGAR HOUSE REVIEW

We’ve loved reading the work that we’ve published (clearly), so now we want an opportunity to better hear our contributors. We will feature an audio recording of a poem from one of our seven issues, read by the poet and updated every couple of weeks. 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.

MATT MASON, "LINES WRITTEN FOR MY DAUGHTER . . . " (Issue 16)



LINES WRITTEN FOR MY DAUGHTER AFTER IT’S THE GREAT PUMPKIN, CHARLIE BROWN ENDS AND THE NETWORK MAKES A TOO-QUICK LEAP TO THE OPENING SCENE OF THIS WEEK’S EPISODE OF SCANDAL, A SCENE WHICH SHOWS THINGS I DID NOT ANTICIPATE BEING ASKED ABOUT BY MY SIX YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER AFTER, AS I BELIEVE I MENTIONED, WATCHING IT’S THE GREAT PUMPKIN, CHARLIE BROWN

I must admit
it was something I cannot imagine Linus,
when he inevitably grows to maturity, would be engaged in
but would always hold in secret
in his thoughts, burning
at the box he shoved and locked and buried and barricaded them inside;

which Schroeder would someday excel at;
Peppermint Patty would dream about it
until she, at a disappointing office party, finally asks herself:

“Charlie Brown? Really?”

which Lucy would, in college, find a man who plays
guitar and demand and demand and demand

and be disappointed and disappointed and disappointed;
which Pig Pen would make most of his short film career garnering accolades for;
which Charlie Brown would fumble, that
light bulb nose of his bonking comically,
that head of his never proportioning to his body, Hindenberging into her knees; oh,

which Sally,
Sally would enter the convent
not thinking about

and find it all dashed the night before her vows
when visions of Linus wash over her,
leave her aching most of all on her long, dark night of the soul
thinking her emptinesses
were still his
to fill.


They would reconnect
by chance
(sort of)
in a Target,
end up sitting
next to one another
in a pumpkin patch no mystic squash would ever rise from,
wind crackling the stiff grass,
leaves shushing and shaking down the streets,
they bump hands by accident (sort of),
too scared to say
what they really wish for,
unable to voice
what is plainest
on their lips.



ABOUT THE POET

Matt Mason has won a Pushcart Prize and two Nebraska Book Awards. He lives in Omaha with his wife, the poet Sarah McKinstry-Brown, and daughters Sophia and Lucia.


ABOUT SUGAR HOUSE REVIEW

We’ve loved reading the work that we’ve published (clearly), so now we want an opportunity to better hear our contributors. We will feature an audio recording of a poem from one of our seven issues, read by the poet and updated every couple of weeks. 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.

ANDREA JURJEVIĆ, "FISH TREATMENT" (Issue 16)



FISH TREATMENT

Nona, who lived through three of them,
rarely talked about wars. In the kitchen

the macramé lampshade filtered
a chain-link shadow across her face,

a grid of borders dividing her neckline,
the dark apron that fell across her breasts

like night over a pair of capsized boats.
The tap water rushed and tumbled

over the mackerel piled in the basin,
her hands holding the dead fish

the way she held her sons, one by one
each year of the Second War,

before pulling a bed sheet over them,
and shutting their thin eyelids for good.

She’d pick up every fish with care, cradle
it in one hand, while her other, free hand

would sink the narrow fillet knife
into its white belly—a narrow passage

one makes when sliding into bed at night.
And like a waking flower, a stream

of blood would bloom within that basin,
her hands brush against its thin petals.


ABOUT THE POET

Andrea Jurjević, a native of Croatia, is the author of Small Crimes, winner of the 2015 Philip Levine Prize. Her poems, as well as her translations of contemporary Croatian poetry, have appeared in journals such as Epoch, TriQuarterly, Best New Poets, The Missouri Review, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of a Robinson Jeffers/Tor House Foundation Award for Poetry, a Tennessee Williams Scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and a Hambidge Fellowship. Her translation of Mamasafari (and other things) from Croatian will be published by Diálogos in 2018.

ABOUT SUGAR HOUSE REVIEW

We’ve loved reading the work that we’ve published (clearly), so now we want an opportunity to better hear our contributors. We will feature an audio recording of a poem from one of our seven issues, read by the poet and updated every couple of weeks. 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.

ELAINE JOHANSON, "I'M THINKING ABOUT YOUR MOTHER" (Issue 16)



I'M THINKING ABOUT YOUR MOTHER

again.
Which is to say:
often,

sinking into the couch
like a half-flooded ship,

the water cradling
then smothering
as the hull tilts.

Okay, and you now:

relief as a delay of pain
instead of its end.

Or:
relief as a form of loss,

collecting in your hollows
like lead dust.

Now me:

as witness, the weight I bear
is all my own.

Now all of us:

seeped together.
A unanimous
rejection.

Why are we always outside
when inside they are singing?

Your head kinks back, throat white as a wrist.

I get it. I know. I showed it to you.
That sheet of stars.


ABOUT THE POET

Elaine Johanson is a writer, teacher, and videographer in Philadelphia. She holds an MFA in poetry from Columbia University.

ABOUT SUGAR HOUSE REVIEW

We’ve loved reading the work that we’ve published (clearly), so now we want an opportunity to better hear our contributors. We will feature an audio recording of a poem from one of our seven issues, read by the poet and updated every couple of weeks. 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.

JEFF EWING, "LAZY EYE" (Issue 16)



LAZY EYE

It sees what it wants and what it doesn’t
it doesn’t—ignores, for instance, the
host face striated as bristlecone bark,
a lentigo tracing the Caspian shore.

General outlines are noted, an overall
impression glazes the retina—a shoebox
diorama holding me fast, leaden feet
glued in the shade of q-tip trees. Doing

the work of two with half-assed effort,
it leaves most depths unplumbed:
What do you see that I don’t, squinting
into the poorly delimited sun?

At night, beads well and fall—I find
them in the morning distilled to crystals.
In trade, the Jewelry and Loan grants
me three wishes I expend for: a glyptic

of seasons turned with loving obsession,
a quart jar preserving the last outcast
breath of the last arctos californicus,
and in rubicund Cambrian amber a photo

of us on the South Rim framed by an
uncertainty no perfect eye can fathom—
rock and pinyon, and the river far below
fogged by unspeakable distance.


ABOUT THE POET

Jeff Ewing is a writer from northern California. His poems and stories have recently been published or are forthcoming in ZYZZYVA, Willow Springs, Catamaran Literary Reader, Atlanta Review, Saint Ann’s Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, Dunes Review, ELJ, and Bridge Eight. He lives in Sacramento, CA with his wife and daughter.

ABOUT SUGAR HOUSE REVIEW

We’ve loved reading the work that we’ve published (clearly), so now we want an opportunity to better hear our contributors. We will feature an audio recording of a poem from one of our seven issues, read by the poet and updated every couple of weeks. 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.

CHANEL BRENNER, "SIX YEARS AFTER MY FIRST SON'S DEATH" (Issue 16)



SIX YEARS AFTER MY FIRST SON'S DEATH

At my younger son’s baseball practice,
a dad talks about his two boys—
all that energy and wrestling at bedtime.

I know I should use the old bread
when I make my son a sandwich,
but I open the new.

It’s wasteful.

Like the hours I spent
pumping milk for my dead son.

Memories of my two boys
flash like reflections
off windshields.

The two of them jumping on the bed,
shrieking with joy,

until they broke the lamp—
shards of glass.

Light
wasted all over the floor.


ABOUT THE POET

Chanel Brenner is the author of Vanilla Milk: a memoir told in poems, (Silver Birch Press, 2014), a finalist for the 2016 Independent Book Awards and honorable mention in the 2014 Eric Hoffer awards. Her poems have appeared in New Ohio Review, Poet Lore, Rattle, Cultural Weekly, Muzzle Magazine, and others. Her poem “July 28th, 2012” won first prize in The Write Place At the Write Time’s contest, judged by Ellen Bass.


ABOUT SUGAR HOUSE REVIEW

We’ve loved reading the work that we’ve published (clearly), so now we want an opportunity to better hear our contributors. We will feature an audio recording of a poem from one of our seven issues, read by the poet and updated every couple of weeks. 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.