JENNIFER STEWART MILLER, "THIS POEM HAS A HIGHWAY IN IT" (Issue 18)

 

THIS POEM HAS A HIGHWAY IN IT

and it speeds upstate toward—

is it home if you’ve never lived there?
This poem merges, changes lanes, and exits—left, past the outlet mall,
then right. Mobile homes edge the road—and staggering barns.
Corn stubble pokes up through snow. A school bus brakes,

and a stop sign pops out. Two boys shuffle off, cross in front
of the poem and disappear. There’s barbed wire
strung here. And a story. Stories, really. Three children
wrenched from their mother—dead, they’re told, though
alive in an asylum they never find. The one sister, 17,

she drowns in a summer pond. There are purple hills, tall pines,
and silos in here, and field after field after field, forget about
dreams. Also a Dunkin’ Donuts, grids of solar panels,
a Ford dealership. We’re upstate, so a prison looms in this poem,
and rows of prison guards’ pickups. Steam escaping

a prison chimney, a river running under a bridge. My mother’s
in here, my stepfather, too—how he hugs women and girls
too close. As if asking: are you my mother? A shuttered restaurant
flies past, a motel without a single car in the lot. The old armory
rises up, a red light against dusk, a left turn. The tumor

on my stepfather’s neck and jaw fattens day after day—the consequence
of little mistakes. Six white horses commune around a mound of hay.
Fields offer up lone machinery: tractor, hay baler, mower, plow.
A dark blue silo. A burned-out house. Haloed by naked trees,
a neighbor’s trailer blazes with light. There are humans

I love in this poem, a rearview mirror—the long, rutted driveway
glazed with ice and age. The house in this poem, a step up
from ramshackle, wasn’t built all at once, but room by room.
Hundreds of acres, forests and fields. Two old bay horses, three ewes,
a hen and rooster, a border collie, a silver tabby. The humans in here

​

were children once. Things happened to them. They made
choices. This poem, too, makes choices. It gets things wrong.
And some things can never be put right. But there’s
mercy in here, tenderness. We cross in front of the poem,
we disappear. The poem goes on.

ABOUT THE POET

Jennifer Stewart Miller holds an MFA from Bennington College and a JD from Columbia University. Her poetry has appeared in Green Mountains Review, Harpur Palate, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Poet Lore, Raleigh Review, and other journals. She’s a Pushcart nominee, and when she’s not off biking somewhere fun, lives in New York with her family and congenitally-deaf Dalmatian, Daisy.

ABOUT SUGAR HOUSE REVIEW

We’ve loved reading the work that we’ve published (clearly), so now we want an opportunity to better hear our contributors. We will feature an audio recording of a poem from one of our seven issues, read by the poet and updated every couple of weeks. 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.

RUTH BAVETTA, "CODEINE" (Issue 18)

CODEINE

I ride a perfect pain until

it becomes a painting on a wall,
a faraway rasp, sullen, sunk
in a soundless lake,
until my dreams
become an intricate embroidery
of colored stones
sewn into my pocket.

ABOUT THE POET

Ruth Bavetta’s poems have been published in Rattle, Nimrod, North American Review, Slant, Tar River Poetry, Spillway, and many others. She has published four books, and has work included in several anthologies. She writes at a messy desk with a view over the Pacific.

ABOUT SUGAR HOUSE REVIEW

We’ve loved reading the work that we’ve published (clearly), so now we want an opportunity to better hear our contributors. We will feature an audio recording of a poem from one of our seven issues, read by the poet and updated every couple of weeks. 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.

DUJIE TAHAT, "THIS IS THE LAST TIME" (Issue 18)

THIS IS THE LAST TIME

you’ll read this for the first time

& think this immigrant doesn’t flock
             like the rest of his sound,
                                                     but then again,
                                                     he’s cranking away
             at the Victrola & you’re about
to place your finger on the tip
             of your tongue
                                      shaped in the name of the song
                          which was only supposed to be
background music for this epithalamion,
             this dirge,
             this glow, this urge,
             this object permanence,
                          obscured by its chiaroscuro
             carrying on,
                                my wayward daughter
             one day will read this & it will mean something
                                                                                          new
                                                                   all over again.
                                                     I know
                              it’s a cheap trick—
             all this jostling & gesturing
into the wildness
             to see the line of a horizon
                                                        break yet again,
                                      but what can I say
that hasn’t been said or stolen
             into the night by an open car
                                                             window
humming on a highway already, sucking mouth
out of a sleeping child’s air
             like it wasn’t ever
                                           supposed to be there.

ABOUT THE POET

Dujie Tahat’s is a Filipino-Jordanian immigrant living in Washington state. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in The Southeast Review, Narrative, Nashville Review, Shenandoah, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, The American Journal of Poetry, and elsewhere. Dujie has earned fellowships from the Richard Hugo House and Jack Straw Writing Program. He serves as a poetry editor for Moss and Homology Lit and cohosts The Poet Salon podcast. He got his start as a Seattle Poetry Slam Finalist, a collegiate grand slam champion, and Seattle Youth Speaks Grand Slam Champion, representing Seattle at HBO’s Brave New Voices.

ABOUT SUGAR HOUSE REVIEW

We’ve loved reading the work that we’ve published (clearly), so now we want an opportunity to better hear our contributors. We will feature an audio recording of a poem from one of our seven issues, read by the poet and updated every couple of weeks. 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.

LEE POTTS, "ASPECT" (Issue 18)

ASPECT

​

1.

Photos make us fools.
Not as light as a brittle brown leaf,
or a train ticket home,
but almost as likely
to lift up out of reckless fingers
into the wind, down the street.
We’ll lunge, chase, and occasionally catch up.

2.

My sled’s steel runners,
father’s coat collar,
the fender of his car,
     in this old photo’s narrow range of Polaroid greys
        nailing down forever where light once was
        and was not,

all increasingly and always
farther away.

ABOUT THE POET

Lee Potts is a poet living in Philadelphia. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Painted Bride Quarterly, Gargoyle, Door is a Jar, Burningword Literary Journal, Saint Katherine Review, 8 Poems, andAmethyst Review. You can find more of his work at LeePotts.net.

ABOUT SUGAR HOUSE REVIEW

We’ve loved reading the work that we’ve published (clearly), so now we want an opportunity to better hear our contributors. We will feature an audio recording of a poem from one of our seven issues, read by the poet and updated every couple of weeks. 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.

STEVEN CRAMER, "THE WORLD" (Issue 18)

THE WORLD

Balancing on his haunches, snapping at a stuffed frog I dangle above his jaws,
my Maltese’s front paws look puny as a kangaroo’s.   He can hold the position
for an astonishing 8 to 10 seconds.   If I were an honest parent, I’d explain to
him the futility of changing one’s nature—like trying to mate different species
of butterflies.   There he goes again, the little boxer . . . and here I go again,
remembering the June my rage overheated until it pounded music out of the
stereo with a mallet. Everyone I loved stopped their horseplay.   I saw two
futures—one a moonlit shoreline; one a diagnosis. There was a third future I
didn’t see.   Although I haven’t yet used the word “world,” when I do, I won’t
mean what that woman meant, index to her temple as she asked: how do you
bring the world into your thinking about art?   That whole summer my black
razor-point pens, when laid side by side, looked like bodies in body bags.

ABOUT THE POET

Steven Cramer is the author of five poetry collections, including Goodbye to the Orchard (Sarabande, 2004)—named an Honor Book in Poetry by the Massachusetts Center for the Book—and Clangings (Sarabande, 2012). His work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Field, The Kenyon Review, The New England Review, The Paris Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. Recipient of an NEA fellowship and two grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, he founded and teaches in the low-residency MFA program in creative writing at Lesley University. StevenCramer.com

ABOUT SUGAR HOUSE REVIEW

We’ve loved reading the work that we’ve published (clearly), so now we want an opportunity to better hear our contributors. We will feature an audio recording of a poem from one of our seven issues, read by the poet and updated every couple of weeks. 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.

TANA JEAN WELCH, "BOSTON UNDERWATER BY 2100" (Issue 18)

BOSTON UNDERWATER BY 2100

The first time

we rode our bikes
            through the Boston Harbor Hotel’s arch,
                           a big band on the floating stage played
                                      a romantic swing burdened by trombones
 

and even though everything went to the rent,
the grandiosity of the hotel, the rotunda, the yachts in their slips
 

was our grandiosity—
 

                                      we were easily drinking
              champagne while discussing
              Dean Martin’s Ten Thousand Bedrooms
 

because our belief
                                        in love was earnest and all
 

we needed—
 

but now the stage is sinking
with the rest
of our created history:
 

wistful walks past Alexander Hamilton on Comm Ave,
            lavender lemonades in Copley Square,
                             the Union Oyster House, our initials carved in stall 19.
 

           

            Once the rain,
its tiny pressure on your scalp, like ants
                             passing the door of a tobacconist.
 

Now the superstorm, the surging tides.

Now you and I,
            the satiated bedroom guests we never were,
            (alongside the rest of the humans) wanting
                             more and more from the collapsing ground—
 

Now Faneuil Hall and every corner
where we met and kissed, where a thousand others met,
             conspired, or exchanged—
 

             each body believing
                             their plot point the most paramount,
                                        each forgetting history and story emerged
 

             from the same word:
istorie—
 

                                                        Now and always forgetting
                              we build our cities to house myths,
                              our histories to house cities—
 

             Soon the sea
will claim this reclaimed land,
             sending these few fragments forever
 

to the drink. Leaving the cities, leaving
             our love
                               

                        

                                                    to become something else.



ABOUT THE POET

Tana Jean Welch is the author of Latest Volcano, winner of the 2015 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in The New York Times, The Southern Review, The Colorado Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Prairie Schooner, and other national literary journals. Born and raised in Fresno, CA, she currently lives in Tallahassee where she is assistant professor of Medical Humanities at the Florida State University College of Medicine. TanaJeanWelch.com

ABOUT SUGAR HOUSE REVIEW

We’ve loved reading the work that we’ve published (clearly), so now we want an opportunity to better hear our contributors. We will feature an audio recording of a poem from one of our seven issues, read by the poet and updated every couple of weeks. 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.

REBECCA ARONSON, "FIRE COUNTRY" (Issue 18)

FIRE COUNTRY

​

Beginning with a line from Tarfia Faizullah’s “West Texas Nocturne”

Because the sky burned, I had to unhinge
my sooty eyes from their lingering.

In the season of undoing, the tender heart-leaves
of the new are shredded

as soon as they arrive. Wind eats the view
and scalds a wrecked swath like a medieval dragon

as it moves across this land I’ve made
a home of. This is the land of the living,

despite what is buried here and the sand
with its urge toward erasure.

Everything is germinating,
and the horizon flares

with fires, distant and close, smoke
the color of sunglasses. I see

but my vision is skewed. Listen. I don’t want
to sound such yearning but the wind howls too

and means nothing by it. The hills are on fire
and the desert is on fire and the air is thick

with other people’s fires. And my own burning
is so small as to go unnoticed.

I am calling but the wind is busy
taking everything away.

ABOUT THE POET

Rebecca Aronson’s books are Ghost Child of the Atalanta Bloom and Creature, Creature. She was a recipient of a Prairie Schooner Strousse Award, the Loft’s Speakeasy Poetry Prize, and a 2018 Tennessee Williams Scholarship to Sewanee. She has poems recently in South Florida Poetry Journal, Tishman Review, and others. She is co-founder and co-host of Bad Mouth, a series of words and music.

ABOUT SUGAR HOUSE REVIEW

We’ve loved reading the work that we’ve published (clearly), so now we want an opportunity to better hear our contributors. We will feature an audio recording of a poem from one of our seven issues, read by the poet and updated every couple of weeks. 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.