DANIELLE BEAZER DUBRASKY—"PETROGLYPHS AT PAROWAN GAP" (Issue 17)

Sugar House Review · Petroglyphs at Parowan Gap

PETROGLYPHS AT PAROWAN GAP

All things crisscross before they disappear into a silence

throbbing between jutted rocks. A trucker drives on a road

perpendicular to the wind gap, visible for a moment, then gone.

A Pontiac guns from the closest town, swerves toward me, honks,

and the men spin away, laugh at my startled jump—I give them the finger. 

We break the reverie summoned from eons of layers that streak rock

masked with graffiti. Names trespass a map carved five centuries ago in 

   sandstone: 

notches, ladders, a sun-circle of concentric rings that gives passage to the next

   traveler.

If we live in dreams, our eyes opening and closing to vistas we create

unless we step into someone else’s meditation, then which ancient one

dreamt this intersection of lines—the distant trucker, the men, and myself,

who wander past a length of road into spirals so carefully engraved?

Our crossing notches a groove in my palm—a new map I now see in my hands.

ABOUT THE POET

 

 Danielle Beazer Dubrasky directs the Grace A. Tanner Center for Human Values and is an associate professor of creative writing at Southern Utah University. Her poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Chiron Review, South Dakota Review, Ninth Letter, Main Street Rag, Pilgrimage, saltfront, Sugar House Review, Cave Wall, Open: Journal of Arts & Letters, Under a Warm Green Linden, and Terrain.org. Her chapbook, Ruin and Light, won the 2014 Anabiosis Press Chapbook Competition. Her poems were also published in a limited-edition art book Invisible Shores by Red Butte Press of the University of Utah. She has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize and twice for Best New Poets. And she is a three-time winner of the Utah Original Writing Competition for poetry. Danielle is also the director of the Eco-poetry and the Essay Conference at Southern Utah University. She received her PhD in creative writing from the University of Utah and an MA in English/Creative Writing from Stanford University.

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.

OMOTUNDE OREDIPE—"IF I DON'T DIE." (Issue 21)

Sugar House Review · Omotunde Oredipe's "If I Don't Die"

IF I DON'T DIE

News reaches us of men burning

at home. The police disperse

the crowd with tear gas and bullets.

We have all seen the footage. I can

still smell the fear, that Saturday afternoon

when the air crackled as the rifles chorused.

My father told me that during the war

the children were told to dive into the

gutters if the ground tremored or planes

roared overhead. I imagine my father

in a ditch somewhere, his skinny arms

flat in front of him, his nose in the dust,

as I hold my own breath under the bed,

in the dimming light of the guestroom.

Father Lord, If I don’t die

I promise to tell daddy about the TV stand I broke.

Amen.

 

ABOUT THE POET 

Omotunde Oredipe was born and raised in Lagos and studied at South Carolina State University, where he served as the Poet Laureate (2016–2017) and founded the Poetry & Ideas Organization. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, The Southampton Review, and The Carolina Quarterly.

 

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 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.