HAN VANDERHART — "ODE TO KNOWING" (Issue 30)

Sugar House Review · Han VanderHart's, "Ode to Knowing"

ODE TO KNOWING

The orchard in my childhood: apple,

pear, cherry I fell from—and a plum tree

neglected every spring, a jelly fungus

taking the purple fruit. No soft plums

in the fridge. There was so much

I thought I could not have; obedience

I had to give. My child body, bruised.

My heart: kept like an abandoned fruit

tree, or a goat to a tether. I did not buck.

I did not bite. I stood in the long grasses.

I’ve since learned that a child cannot

provide. That fruit and animals both

need tending hands—hold me, comb me,

were words that for years I could not

say. But now I feel the wisteria around

my thighs. The landscape curls with relief.

There is ripe fruit in the shape of your mouth.

ABOUT THE POET 

Han VanderHart is a queer writer living in Durham, NC, under the pines. Their 

second poetry collection, Larks (Ohio University Press, 2025), was selected by 

Chanda Feldman as winner of the 2024 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize. Han is also 

the author of What Pecan Light (Bull City Press, 2021) and has essays and poetry 

published in Kenyon Review, The American Poetry Review, The Rumpus, AGNI, 

and elsewhere. Han hosts Of Poetry Podcast and, alongside Amorak Huey, coedits 

the poetry press River River Books.

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.

ELLA FLORES — "FIELD NOTES FROM THE CREATION MUSEUM" (Issue 30)

Sugar House Review · Ella Flores's, "Field Notes from the Creation Museum"

FIELD NOTES FROM THE CREATION MUSEUM

After the Tower of Babel diorama

    you arrive at a Kentucky nuclear

wasteland where mannequin Moses

    asks mannequin David, Why do I

suffer? A projector whirs the answer:

    a million CGI particles form a fully

adult, human male—No baby Adam.

    No diaper changing station

in the men’s bathroom. No stopping the field

    tripping students from prodding fertilized

egg models and life-sized fetuses. Or shoving

    their way through the Garden of Eden

exhibit to be first in line for the petting-zoo-food-

    court-equipped Ark, where a premium ticket

gets you the Deluge Experience and rainbows

    are kept to a minimum. Please leave

in twos, a placard points to the gift shop.

    In the humor section you buy a birthday

card with a unicorn nuzzling a brontosaurus

telling him, It doesn’t hurt.

Not really.

ABOUT THE POET 

Ella Flores is a poetry PhD candidate at SUNY Binghamton and has recent 

or forthcoming work in The Penn Review, DIAGRAM, Salamander, Hunger 

Mountain, and others.

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.

MIKE WHITE — "FAIRGROUND (OLD PHOTOGRAPH)" (Issue 30)

Sugar House Review · Mike White's, "Fairground (Old Photograph)"

FAIRGROUND (OLD PHOTOGRAPH) 

Given that the colors

must already be

imagined,

allow the mind’s eye

to erase

every last bobbing balloon,

and then subtract

the levitating strings.

Now keep

squarely in view

the clenched raised fists

of the stone-faced children.

ABOUT THE POET 

Mike White is the author of two prize-winning collections: How to Make a 

Bird with Two Hands (Word Works, 2012) and Addendum to a Miracle 

(Waywiser, 2017). Individual poems have appeared in journals, including Poetry, 

Ploughshares, The New Republic, The Yale Review, The Kenyon Review, The Iowa 

Review, Copper Nickel, Rattle, and previously in Sugar House Review. Originally 

from Canada, he now lives in Salt Lake City and teaches at the University of Utah.

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.

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.