BETSY MITCHELL MARTINEZ—"BUILDING L: LOS DANANTES" (Issue 28)

Sugar House Review · Betsy Mitchell Martinez's, "Building L: Los Danzantes"

BUILDING L: LOS DANANTES

I’m tired of speaking the language 

of my dreams, with its childhood rhymes 

and tidepools, its bulbs exploding 

on schedule into clusters of grape 

hyacinths. Let’s order brides on the internet 

and shape our mouths into fruits 

or kitchen utensils. Isn’t the weather 

fine today? Would you like some sugar 

in your coffee? When we visited 

the ancient Zapotec city, we crouched 

in the temple of los danzantes and studied 

the curves of naked men presumed 

by early anthropologists to be bent 

in dance. We now believe them to be 

corpses, genitals replaced with 

flowery scrolls. This is what I mean 

when I talk about dancing. 

ABOUT THE POET 

Betsy Michtell Martinez received an MFA from the University of 

Michigan. Her poems have appeared in The Northwest Review and Crab 

Orchard Review.

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.

CYAN JAMES—"Q: ARE YOU CONCERNED ABOUT DIABETES" (Issue 28)

Sugar House Review · Cyan James', "Q: Are You Concerned About Diabetes"

Q: ARE YOU CONCERNED ABOUT DIABETES

A: Sugar is more bam per gram than gunpowder but that’s only a 

fact not a feeling 

Kinds of sugar: caster, granulated, pearl, cane, demerara, turbinado, 

muscovado. Sounds like bachata song titles. Juicy entanglement. Ever smelled 

a cane field on fire? Piccolo note of sweet among the whirling pillar of smoke, 

hawks up high to pierce all the mammals on fire rushing the field’s edges. 

It kills kills kills even though it purrs so loud it fills your mouth it’s still a tiger 

in your kitchen. Possible to imagine people as the personified causes of their 

deaths, such as corpses like a row of frosted cakes in frilly white wrappers 

We make it at seven ounces a day per person, 160 pounds per person per year, 

enough to bury us all. How often we say ‘I love you’ or ‘I’m sorry’ or ‘let’s 

celebrate’ with the slow poison of custards, pecan pie, butter biscuits with tea 

Basterdsuiker: what the Dutch called adding molasses. Sugar so prestigious 

when pure, colonists gobbled it until they got black teeth. If they couldn’t buy 

it, they blackened their teeth to appear rich enough (to be giving themselves 

gum rot), and that’s just about everything you need to know about my people.

ABOUT THE POET 

Cyan James holds an MFA from the University of Michigan. Her work has been 

nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and published in Gettysburg Review, Michigan 

Quarterly Review, Arkansas Review, New Mexico Review, Harvard Review, and 

Salon, among others. She also holds a PhD in public-health genetics and works in 

health policy. Currently she is revising a novel about the young women who 

survived the Green River Killer. She loves fiddles, falconry, long road trips, and 

old front porches.

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.

ANN-MARIE BLANCHARD—"FIDELITY IS NOT DEAD" (Issue 28)

Sugar House Review · Ann-Marie Blanchard's, "Fidelity Is Not Dead"

FIDELITY IS NOT DEAD

Fidelity’s baby is dead. She named him Bruce 

and he said goodbye, slipped into the toilet, 

stingray resplendent. It hurt. Fidelity scooped 

his jelly body out the bowl and buried him under 

the camelia, placed a brick over his head; a Virgin 

of Guadalupe candle too (even though she’s had it 

with the Virgin). Some women don’t bury their jelly 

babies. Some don’t give them names. Some don’t 

tell anyone they birthed a jelly baby on the weekend. 

Fidelity is not some women. Fidelity tries to trust 

her body again—invites it out for coffee, asks what 

it does for a living; doctors tell her body to try again. 

Fidelity tries to chart her surges, tries to make love 

even though love makes death. People say her dead 

baby is the shade of hope. When did they last birth 

a stingray? Don’t tell Fidelity about hope. Don’t tell 

her about fish oil. Don’t tell her about mystics. Don’t 

tell her to stick needles in her body at strategic points. 

Don’t tell Fidelity she’s thirty-eight, daily. Don’t tell 

her about prayer beads, holy water, wine fasts and 

running fast. Fidelity knows a thing or two about 

quackery. Fidelity prefers boa constrictors to babies, 

falcons to friends, lizards to lovers, horn sharks to hope.

ABOUT THE POET 

Ann-Marie Blanchard teaches poetry and philosophy at The University of Notre 

Dame on the west coast of Australia, having taught writing for a decade at 

universities in the US. Her work has appeared in The Missouri Review, A Public 

Space, Adroit Journal, Palette Poetry, Meanjin Quarterly, Westerly, Cordite 

Poetry Review, and elsewhere. In 2022, she won The Missouri Review 

Editors’ Prize in Fiction.

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.

LYNN KILPATRICK—"JACKSON POLLOCK PAINTS A SELF-PORTRAIT" (Issue 28)

Sugar House Review · Lynn Kilpatrick's, "Jackson Pollock Paints a Self-portrait"

JACKSON POLLOCK PAINTS A SELF-PORTRAIT

If the brushstroke embodies representation, 

let this drop of paint be the thin membrane 

between being and seeing. Let the exact gray 

of my eyes become nothing more than gauze

through which I see the canvas, darkly. She 

said show me the exact yellow of light, 

and I said, I don’t paint that shit. I said 

every canvas is a self-portrait, every 

drop of paint is a whiff of the world

that can’t be unmade. I am painting 

the world in my image, one giant white 

mistake at a time. I said, stand back. 

I said, Look at this. 

ABOUT THE POET 

Lynn Kilpatrick's poems have appeared in Western Humanities Review, 

McSweeney’s, Tin House, and Denver Quarterly. Her collection of short 

stories In the House was published by FC2. Her fiction has appeared in 

Ploughshares, essays in Zone 3 and Brevity. She earned her PhD from the 

University of Utah and teaches at Salt Lake Community College.

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.

CHRISTY PRAHL—"STILL LIFE" (Issue 28)

Sugar House Review · Christy Prahl's, "Still Life"

STILL LIFE 

There is a lemon.

There is a dachshund.

There is a broken board.

Consider the lemon,

yellow as the sun,

primal as the origin story of food.

Enter the dachshund,

squat and disproportionate circus

clown of dogs.

And now the broken board,

an accident in waiting.

What does that have to do with anything?

asks the new sweetheart,

a literalist, but strapping enough

to keep around for entertainment.

Have you never played the game

of lemon, dachshund, broken board?

Dachshund beats broken board.

Broken board beats lemon.

Lemon beats dachshund.

(The sour tongue, you ninny.)

It might surprise you to learn

that they all made me cry.

The dachshund for dying of bloat

after I let myself love her.

The lemon for a spray of citric acid in the eye

while brightening up the flounder.

The broken board for my sweetheart’s twisted ankle,

the fear that he would leave me.

But somehow, he stays.

He writes me a song called

A Lemon, A Dachshund, A Broken Board.

It is a song about none of these things.

It goes like this.

ABOUT THE POET 

Christy Prahl is the author of the collection We Are Reckless (Cornerstone Press,

2023). A Best of the Net and two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her past and future publications include The Penn Review, Salt Hill Journal, Eastern Iowa Review, and

others. She has held residencies at both Ragdale and the Writers' Colony at Dairy

Hollow and is the founder of the PenRF reading series. She splits her time

between Chicago and rural Michigan and appreciates subways and siloes in equal

measure. More of her work can be found at

https://christyprahl.wixsite.com/christy-prahl.

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.