M. CYNTHIA CHEUNG—"WITNESS" (Issue 23)

Sugar House Review · M. Cynthia Cheung's "Witness"

WITNESS

Shards of bald cypress
wreck the sky. Each night’s
turmoil of feral hogs stiffens
in mud. Behind the metal
grate, the trapped boar
swells and surges, all
hackles and fever, tusks
bursting the leaf litter.

The game warden’s rifle draws
a line between his eye and ear.

This is how I imagine
ice splits granite,
or the way Newton’s
second law translates:
the sudden posture
of a force accelerating
into nothing but mass.

 

ABOUT THE POET 

M. Cynthia Cheung is an internist who trained at the University of California, Los Angeles, and currently practices hospital medicine in Texas. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Journal of the American Medical Association, Zócalo Public Square, Hawaii Pacific Review, and The Ekphrastic Review, among others. She was previously a finalist for the Michael E. Debakey Poetry Contest, and is on the judging panel for 2021.

 

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.

OWEN MCLEOD—"LOVE'S THERMAL SERVICES" (Issue 23)

Sugar House Review · Owen McLeod's "Love’s Thermal Services"

LOVE’S THERMAL SERVICES

The most important things?
Grass long and weedy, wheels
of abandoned bicycles, Saturn’s rings,
fruits that can be washed and dried,
ears, lightning, singing, glass jars
filled with cut flowers, gold, green,
select industries, certain cars, pencils
and the scent of their shavings.

What’s the problem?
The destruction of air and earth
and of the summer camp where you hid
in the woods beautifully, beautiful, sinful—
your little heart foaming
like a cake of pink soap.

ABOUT THE POET 

Owen McLeod teaches philosophy at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania. He has this recurring anxiety dream in which he is alive.

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.

KATE NORTHROP—"JITTERY NOCTURNE" (ISSUE 22)

Sugar House Review · Kate Northrop's "Jittery Nocturne"

JITTERY NOCTURNE

Outside after a bad dream —no stars,
no canopy of leaves— just streets
 

and down those streets, like large
flat rocks in the middle of a stream, my neighbors’ houses.

•

But sometimes, walking around, straight ahead
on sidewalks, I correspond with arguments

swimming at the heart of houses, and move parallel

to their interiors: old clothes, crates,
canned peaches —everything

sinking to the bottom of the bottom of houses.

•

Rain, starting slowly, thuds

the metal bottom of a boat— a sound you know in the middle
of the night in houses. And there’s a current pulling

at the boat, the movement of debt— we do not

own these houses.

•

Often I am brushed on the leg —right in the kitchen!—
by a fish, yet my sisters trust the integrity of houses.

Lately I’m happy to be having the sex I am having
most often now, inside of houses.

Those tiny, inquisitive sea horses, flickering
here and there— how they addressed us we will remember in houses.

•

Later, like an allowance, the moon comes round: fat, white

Later the moon floods
the alleys, empties the rooms of our houses.

•

How I know I am not happens most often in houses:
creaking the floorboards, slowly breathing in houses.

 

ABOUT THE POET

Kate Northrop is a recipient of the Jeannette Haien Ballard Writers Award and fellowships at the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo. Her recent poetry collections are Clean (Persea Books) and cuntstruck (C and R Press). Northrop is a contributing editor at The American Poetry Review and teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Wyoming. She lives in Laramie, WY.

 

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.

MARIA ZOCCOLA—"FLANNERY O'CONNOR AND I GO BOWLING" (Issue 23)

Sugar House Review · Maria Zoccola's "flannery o'connor and i go bowling"

FLANNERY O'CONNOR AND I GO BOWLING

a lane is also an aisle. a ball is also a weight.
i bought her a ninety-cent fountain drink
that in her hands morphed into a pitcher of light,
a pitcher made of light full up with light,

light inside of light, sharp pulsing brightness
of a birth or a blow. when she drank
a blaze ripped down her throat in one straight line,
and in her stomach i saw cells take the light

to all corners of skin, all specks of blood,
each small grain of bone. god hovered
in place above the pin machine, opening
and closing his mouth. i touched her palm

so i could hear him, the roar of his voice
sweeping down the boards, tumbling and crashing,
keeping careful score. wouldn’t it be best
if we were different people, i said,

but she told me the self comes back
like a sleeping bulb, like a bowling ball,
returned from tunnels under the earth,
delivered for us to throw away again.

 

ABOUT THE POET 

Maria Zoccola is a queer Southern writer with deep roots in the Mississippi Delta. She has writing degrees from Emory University and Falmouth University. Her work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, 32 Poems, The Massachusetts Review, Colorado Review, Southern Indiana Review, Salamander, 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.