ADAM D. WEEKS—"ON MARCH" (Issue 22)

Sugar House Review · Adam D. Weeks's "On March"

ON MARCH

For the Welsh Marches
with lines from The Roots

This isn’t what we wanted, because who wants a road
without lines or a song that seems to bleed into elegy—

because it isn’t the time for that. It isn’t liminal, isn’t
your words as they sing so loud into sky, some slip and carry

to say rhythmically, you got to be in one place or another. You won’t
tell me to move my body like that. It isn’t all about

the static, baby, not the unbecoming. It isn’t on the plane,
not flying low over Wales like a bird looking

for space to land, it isn’t time for that either. It’s on my arm
on my drive home, it’s singing so soft I can’t help but turn

my head and tell it shush, and isn’t that all we know to do
now? It’s stitched into the sky, singing through teeth

to tell my part of the song, it’s goin’, it’s goin’,
it’s gone—and you’re welcome to that too.

ABOUT THE POET 

Adam D. Weeks is an undergraduate student studying English at Salisbury University. He is the social media manager for The Shore Poetry and has poems published or forthcoming in Ninth Letter, Poet Lore, Puerto del Sol, Slipstream Press, Prairie Margins, The Allegheny Review, and elsewhere.

 

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.

CLAIRE MCQUERRY—"TAKING IT" (Issue 22)

Sugar House Review · Taking It

TAKING IT

My friend sends an email linked to news
about women freezing their eggs—
as early as possible in their 30s,
she says. My fiancé is on the phone
with “his” jeweler about Christmas diamonds.
I don’t like diamonds, the way they look
obligatory and mean. My eggs, I’m told,
degrade a little more each year. There’s
a surgical mesh—I don’t quite understand this—
I could have implanted in my breasts,
“to give them a natural lift again,” to make me
look like a woman whose eggs are still intact,
who men still want. I read this in an in-flight
magazine. “You know how women over 40
are invisible,” says the man ahead of me
in the grocery line. “I don’t have any problem
getting laid. She’s gonna know she screwed up
real soon though, my ex.” Snow comes
early this year and turns the roads to diamond
lacquer. My affianced canceled his flight
for uncertain reasons, and I might brave the drive
to my parents’. I remember when Thanksgiving
was fleece by a fire. We’d ice cookies
and decorate a tree. At 16, ferrying
deviled eggs on a cut-glass plate,
I overheard grandmother telling mother
I had a nice figure—my breasts, then,
in no need of mesh. Still, the feeling wasn’t
gladness but shame. “If I come out, you’ll only
start a fight,” the fiancé says because I am,
like the rest of my sex, irrational, though
on the upside, I know how to bake a pie
and I like, he says with certainty,
cleaning things. “Your house is always
so clean.” I hate to clean, just less
than I hate a mess. The line between
when he means it and when he’s goading
often erodes. Snow keeps sifting through
the streetlights like static, like the silver
notes of an oboe. It’s true I’ve wanted
a wedding, photogenic with tea lights,
a real band. It’s true the venue’s already
booked. Of my one book, the older
male writer said, “It’s too feminine—
the title and also that dress on your cover.”
The woman’s body, her diamonds,
the gown, an embarrassment
of curves and froth. “Emotional,”
the fiancé says. “You get emotional.”
I froth yes, in flounces of poems. It’s true
mom taught me how to make sauces,
true she taught me how to just take it.
It’s true I’ve already tasted the cake
and found it much too sad.

 

ABOUT THE POET 

Claire McQuerry’s poetry collection Lacemakers (Southern Illinois University Press) won the Crab Orchard First Book Prize, and her poems have appeared in Tin House, Waxwing, Poetry Northwest, American Literary Review, and other journals. She is an assistant professor at Bradley 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.