POSTCARD FROM COMPASS ROSE
I’ve been traveling lately
without you. Remember that
time you said I was the flower
drawn in the corners of maps
by careful cartographers to give
you guidance? A lodestar leading
you so you may not be alone—
may find your way back home.
I got word you miss me, but it
doesn’t show in your ways. Now
you leave home with just your
smartphone and trust in GPS—
a guiding hand, a trying-to-be-
charming voice—and you’re made
to feel comfortably lost never
knowing where you are except
on the way, as far as I can tell.
Is that like falling in love? You
know, my face was first traced
by the winds I kissed the mouths
of, as have many men—explorers
and those who came after—
looking to see the world. Best
of luck along your way
to where you want to be.
ABOUT THE POET
Sean Hill is the author of two poetry collections, Dangerous Goods (Milkweed
Editions, 2014), awarded the Minnesota Book Award in Poetry, and Blood Ties &
Brown Liquor (UGA Press, 2008), named one of the Ten Books All Georgians
Should
Read in 2015 by the Georgia Center for the Book. Hill has received
numerous awards,
including fellowships from the Cave Canem Foundation, the
Bush Foundation,
Stanford University, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Hill’s poems and
essays have appeared in Callaloo, Harvard Review, New England
Review, Orion,
Oxford American, Poetry, Tin House, and numerous other journals,
and in over two
dozen anthologies including Black Nature, Villanelles, and Cascadia
Field Guide. A
volume of poems selected from Blood Ties & Brown Liquor and
Dangerous Goods has
been translated and published in Korean. Hill lives in
southwestern Montana with his
family and is a professor of creative writing at the
University of Montana.
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.
