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.
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