SEAN HILL — "WANT AT THE TRANSFER STATION" (Issue 30)

Sugar House Review · Sean Hill's, "Want at the Transfer Station"

WANT AT THE TRANSFER STATION

A slipping whistling sliding sound of a song

calls my attention at the City of Helena

Solid Waste Transfer Station where the sign reads

NO SCAVENGING Violators Will Be Prosecuted

where I was just moments ago with my seven-year-old

son and our recycling minding my own business

and with questions on my mind—Where will this

harvest from our garbage go? What will we reap?

What did we sow?—when your song found me and I

call my son’s attention to it. I want to share the singer

with my son in the middle of our recycling run to this

transfer station like when a jam from my youth

comes on the radio when we’re in the middle of our

erranding for things to bring home and I get excited.

I once heard the clear whistles of one of your eastern

cousins’ songs and thought it sang Hey young man, go away.

And once a friend said you sound like you’re singing a question;

he heard a rising call that I didn’t, and if it was, it would

have been uptalking seeking agreement, right? Since, what

question would you have? Aside from those questions of life—

how to keep your body safe and going in order to make

generations to come—those needs and drives, which may sit

in you not as questions. At any rate, I want him, my son,

to see you, the belter of the song that drops, a drawly

glissando or perhaps twangy vibrato, a western song,

with that bright bib, the yellow of a sunflower? Some flower?

Or maybe the yellow of detritus gathered with hope

of it getting a new use—an emptied laundry detergent

jug or Pacifico can? Not a question in my want,

what I mean is (trying to find you with my eye) I want

to show my boy not metaphors in the day but your coal black

necklace bold against that yellow reminding me of that boy-mensch

Charlie Brown’s shirt and your streaked mantle of browns

and blacks on your wings and back matching the dried grasses

and the shadows they cast to keep you hid in your ground feeding

and ground nesting habits and hard to find in this valley east

of MacDonald Pass and the continental divide in this watershed

with your spill of those liquid slipping notes in a run that floats

open over the open land next to the roll-off dumpsters.

ABOUT THE POET 

Sean Hill is the author of Dangerous Goods and Blood Ties & Brown Liquor, 

and the forthcoming collection, The Negroes Send Their Love. His poems have 

appeared in Callaloo, Harvard Review, The Oxford American, Poetry, Tin House, 

and numerous other journals, and in several anthologies including Black Nature 

and Villanelles. Hill lives in southwestern Montana with his family and is an 

associate 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.

LAUREN CAMP — "AS LONG AS I SEE" (Issue 30)

Sugar House Review · Lauren Camp's “As Long as I See”

AS LONG AS I SEE

Onto the same valley, I keep looking. Impossible that

the future is instantly changed.

Empty land will continue

to set slight

wind. I woke

at dawn and asked the flat

dark to sing me

its wings. Reason could be the lantern

of owls. I went mapping the body-blood, and escaped

to previous versions and margins

where I reappear in echo. Now I look

at this valley straight across, gold fields

and leaf flutter, fences, lulled cows. Aluminum trailers wriggle

and flex dirt roads. Each shift of peaks and triangulated

pine. The moon curls, and circles

slink about on the pond.

Time widens along west.

Before this, I would have to poke silence—

expecting much to be the only value.

I am looking at the valley because that is what there is

to do and it is already justified. I have buried my father.

Birds scale sand dunes in unison.

ABOUT THE POET 

Lauren Camp serves as New Mexico Poet Laureate. She is the author of eight 

books of poetry, most recently In Old Sky (Grand Canyon Conservancy, 2024). A 

former Astronomer-in-Residence at Grand Canyon National Park, she was a 

finalist for the Arab American Book Award, New Mexico-Arizona Book Award, 

and Adrienne Rich Award. Her poems have been translated into Mandarin, 

Turkish, Spanish, French, and Arabic. LaurenCamp.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.

SUPHIL LEE PARK — "HERE ARE SOME FLOWERS" (Issue 30)

Sugar House Review · Suphil Lee Park's “Here Are Some Flowers”

HERE ARE SOME FLOWERS

In a gentler dream, I thumbed

each hydrangea socket wet

onto your palm, purple scabs right off

my lips, as if to not

press: look what you’ve done.

Its head, all eyes in the darkest

corner of summer.

In another, someone pointed out the rarity

of fathers in my poems and spoke around

all the frothy mothers. How to say I’m my father

in pastel has no better lyric place

to go to than silence?

In a less gentle dream, I dove face

first into a meadow made of bees so high

on flowers they recited the whole glossary.

I ran out of memory and started to abridge.

Ended up with acronyms on the cusp

of prescriptions.

An ocean of pistils drowned me

from afar.

From another dream, I uncrinkled

a twenty-dollar bill for tulips a touch

paler than the banana peel

still rotting in my sink.

ABOUT THE POET 

Suphil Lee Park (수필 리 박 / 秀筆李朴) is a writer and translator from South 

Korea. She is the author of Still Life (Factory Hollow Press, 2023), selected by 

Ilya Kaminsky as the winner of the Tomaž Šalamun Prize, and Present Tense 

Complex (Conduit Books & Ephemera, 2021), which won the Marystina 

Santiestevan Prize. She also translated An Unraveling of One, an anthology 

of pre-twentieth-century Korean women’s poetry (forthcoming from the 

University Press of SHSU, 2027). Her work has appeared in The Kenyon 

Review, The New Republic, Poetry, and elsewhere. Suphil-Lee-Park.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.

LIZZY 柯 (Ke) POLISHAN — "TRANSDIFFERENTIATION" (Issue 30)

Sugar House Review · “transdifferentiation” by Lizzy 柯 (Ke) Polishan

TRANSDIFFERENTIATION

why not talisman your body with cheap charms?

chew the unspeakable 桃子? sail off in search of ambrosia?

golden apples? a holy grail? you can’t count

on transmigration to pour your soul back into a human vessel / you can’t count on

your honda’s transmission to hold until you get home / if metempsychosis is

stolen immortality, you feel no remorse / do you really want to return

from cosmic comatose bliss to be a long-stem rose or some other symbol

of someone else’s love? ask sisyphus to trace the shape

of his callouses and tell you how happy he feels / you can wait for late to retronym

your proper name, bingeing bake off, knitting snood after snood, or you can find

the magical grackles / they’ll exchange your freudian regressions for

a child-sized skeleton / fresh lenses / firm skin... / up to you / you are now approaching

the point of radioactive decay / a half-life crisis / the instant of your transformation

into clever lead / if you’re clever enough, you can pestle yourself

a helichrysum-meets-cicada-skin cocktail / name it ‘transdifferentiation’ /

delirious, you’ll delete freckles! / sunspots! / buy crop

tops again! / if a jellyfish can do it so can you—

channel your inner turritopsis dohrnii & unsheathe your spine! /

just like sliding a toothpick from your favorite amuse-bouche /

convert to a glossy polyp / a blob / slippery / shimmery / reborn

on the seafloor / on the seafloor / surrender / you’ll love what you’ve become

ABOUT THE POET 

Lizzy 柯 (Ke) Polishan’s poems appear in Gulf Coast, Passages North, EPOCH, 

RHINO, Tupelo Quarterly, petrichor., Poet Lore, Rust + Moth, Greensboro Review,

Pacifica, and others. She is a guest editor at Palette, a poetry reader at Psaltery & 

Lyre, and the managing editor at River & South Review. She is the author of 

A Little Book of Blooms (2020). She lives in Pennsylvania with her husband.

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.

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.