Thursday, September 24, 2020

JOEL LONG—"PRESERVATION" (Issue 20)

PRESERVATION 

After they buried the man, the villagers returned
for the crocodiles. They did not care which one
killed the man. Some were longer than the dead man;

some were small as children. They were housed in cement boxes,
slick green, squared water beneath, not mangrove swamps
or deltas, estuaries or river mouths. The villagers did not

care they were safe for now, did not care it was only one.
They brought ropes and tied serrated snouts of crocodiles
that, with a leap, could catch, swallow whole bats, leaping fish,

birds out of air. They dragged 300 bewildered beasts
from ponds into the open where the villagers wailed
the death of one of their own, lifted knives for every animal,

hammers, clubs, beat down the long heads, inscrutable eyes
hooded by scales that not one villager could see far enough
inside to make him hold back once since all knew the spark

they needed extinguished inside the heart of the one animal
before them, inside that brain that they intended to crush
until there was nothing more worth crushing, some groan

we cannot translate seeping from the roped mouths. The man,
they say, was picking grass when the crocodile attacked. Now hundreds
of crocodiles, each perfect in its skeleton, in the way the stomach

worked and tongue, that heart stilled in artisan chambers whose
electric pulse sent blood from nostril to tail, each animal its own
size, colored like agates and jade, every scale a worry stone, round,

one for every hand, now hundreds of crocodiles are dead, and we cannot
make one of them, make even one come back, a pile of limp weeds
shaped like crocodiles swimming in crocodiles stilled: one dead man

cannot say a thing about what he thinks about the body
and what was undone and the darkness he left behind, smoke,
rising from perfect bodies of crocodiles into the flame of sky.



ABOUT THE POET 

Joel Long’s book Winged Insects won the White Pine Press Poetry Prize. Lessons in Disappearance (2012) and Knowing Time by Light (2010) were published by Blaine Creek Press. His chapbooks, Chopin’s Preludes and Saffron Beneath Every Frost were published by Elik Press. His poems and essays have appeared in Gettysburg Review, Sports Literate, Prairie Schooner, Bellingham Review, Rhino, Bitter Oleander, Massachusetts Review, Terrain.org, and Water-Stone Review, among others. He lives in Salt Lake City.

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.

Thursday, September 17, 2020

ROBERT LYNN—"I WANTED TO BE A NEW YORK LOVE POEM" (Issue 20)

I WANTED TO BE A NEW YORK LOVE POEM

To the woman getting off the train who offered to throw
away my browning banana peel. To these men posing

for photos with their cat on the beach. To Nancy screaming
at Coney’s seagulls: Today I am twenty-four and you don’t care.

To the seagulls who don’t care staring religious into January
winds. To the strangers and strangers and strangers still

catching Jillian as she passes out on the 77th Street station stairs.
Or again on the Brooklyn Bridge. Again in that forever hallway

connecting the 7 to the G in Queens. To the woman having trouble
modulating her voice on the Staten Island Ferry when she sees

the backlit statue: This is my America, Randall. I’m not going
back to Atlanta.
Even to the person whispering I’m sorry

I’m sorry I’m sorry so softly to the rest of us as he jerks himself
off in the corner of this subway car. To the grace of his embarrassed

turning away. To everyone. I wanted to be a love poem to everyone
but I couldn’t. There was all this hardness. There were cops breaking

broomsticks in Abner Louima. They wanted us to forget. Hoped
we’d move away. Forget if Eric Garner sold loose cigarettes

or played center for the Nets. I spent the morning visiting a friend
in Rikers Island. Visited mostly its indifferent way of turning a day

into early evening with nothing to show for it but the waiting.
They broke his leg before they put him here. They already forgot.

They thought we’d be happy being love poems. We still might be
if we hold space for the way this love sharpens like a bottle

in a bar fight. I hold it firmly but gently like a cat on a beach.
The way you would a stranger falling back into you on the stairs.

None of us are going back, Randall. You hear me. None of us.

 

ABOUT THE POET 

Robert Lynn is writer and attorney from Fauquier County, VA. He is currently an MFA student in poetry at New York University. His poems have been featured or are forthcoming in American Literary Review, Antioch Review, Blackbird, New Ohio Review, and other publications. He lives in Brooklyn.

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.

Thursday, September 10, 2020

LAURA GROTHAUS—"LINGUISTICS" (Issue 20)

LINGUISTICS

after Still life by Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps

Even now, I try to be generous with language
like bats with blood, who turn out their stomachs’
larders for hungry drifters. I tender my bluntness

and barber my temper. My hands dance
open with speech. Tell me again how
wings and tongues make consequences out of air.

Visual art by Laura Grothaus


ABOUT THE POET 

Laura Grothaus is a Baltimore-based poet and visual artist. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and garnered awards internationally, from Poetry in Pubs in Bath, England to the Nazim Hikmet Poetry Competition in Cary, NC. Galleries in New York and San Diego have shown her drawings, and she’s partnered with musicians, activists, and visual artists on workshops and performance projects in Chicago, Cincinnati, and Baltimore. When she was five years old, she lit her hair on fire with her own birthday candles.

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.