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.

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.