GAYLORD BREWER — "TO S., A NOTE ON FOOD ETIQUETTE" (Issue 29)

Sugar House Review · Gaylord Brewer's, "To S., a Note on Food Etiquette"

TO S., A NOTE ON FOOD ETIQUETTE

                                     after Alan Dugan

Let’s say for example, if, as you hover

at the edge of the raucous kitchen,

nibbling the last slice of, say, apricot tart

others paid for, openly advertising

you’ve no dinner for yourself, someone offers,

for sake of argument, half a beautiful omelet

clearly intended entirely for himself,

as perhaps he has fasted all day,

you should understand this generosity

as social invitation, and whether or not

you twice demur—both plate and table—

it remains inappropriate that the dish

later disappear from the counter

as if by a thief ’s hand, as breaking of bread

is how community is nourished, relationships

are healed, culture and custom paid forward,

and if you do choose to snag the food

when no one’s looking and make a run

for your closet of a studio, this omelet

made with love from fresh eggs, mushrooms,

peas purchased at the farmers market,

say peas shelled just that afternoon

and a walk to town for a warm baguette

all at the expense of the cook’s time,

and say moreover, to our point, it is a sublime

omelet, lightly browned on the outside,

unbelievably butter-rich and luxurious inside,

possibly the best goddamn omelet

ever made in human history and the maker

ends his meal hungry as reward for kindness,

consider that you might at a point in time

at least mention having eaten, maybe even

enjoyed the fucking eggs you didn’t deserve,

simply acknowledge the gesture.

Just a thought I wanted to share.

ABOUT THE POET 

Gaylord Brewer has been a professor at Middle Tennessee State University

for three decades. The most recent of his 17 books of poetry, fiction, criticism, 

and cookery is a just-published collection of brief nonfiction, Before the 

Storm Takes It Away (Red Hen Press, 2024).

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.

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.