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Sunday, August 21, 2022

MIKE GOOD—"CHANGING THE REAR BRAKES, I WATCH MY DEATH APPROACH" (Issue 24)

CHANGING THE REAR BRAKES, I WATCH MY DEATH APPROACH

“…if you’re

old enough to read this you know what

work is, although you may not do it.”

     

     —Philip Levine, “What Work Is”

You could have walked past that pockmarked driveway

never seeing the honey locust in the backyard,

behind the birch in the front where the dog tied to the porch

is making a ruckus, where rain began to fall, lightly at first,

then pinging across the roof, splashing

from the slapdash PVC downspouts,

as if these small misdirections could stop the brick

and concrete walls from sloping, bowing, from becoming dust,

where two brothers and their father crouch,

waterlogged, beneath the wheel well of a too-old car,

soaking in the grayest Pittsburgh rain, finagling bits with the needle-nose,

losing grip on the brake springs that are unwilling to stretch

across the pads, cursing each slipping piece, flinching

at the sharp and delicate kickback, tired after long

sledgehammering those rear drums apart,

only to break what was within, prying open a decade-
and-a-half of rust suturing metal

to metal, a thick and barnacled crust, heavy

and toxic as the brake fluids spilling now from the broken rubber wheel cylinder

busted open and bleeding

from all the hammering, refusing to compress

with the springs, to be anything but an obstacle, another part to repair,

for this family who cannot afford to move

beneath the mortgages, second mortgages, rent, repairs,

credit cards. You see now, both brothers still squatting,

both over thirty, both struggling to make

ends meet, like their father who works part-time even after retirement.

Look closer: as far as you’ve come, you still haven’t figured out

what it is. You want to keep walking, away from each decade

of sweat, stress, and toil and call it work. You wanted to march

on Labor Day with the teachers union but you have never taught. Instead

you tried to help yourself, went nowhere. Whether you have ever taken a sledge

to a tire and missed, felt your skin frying

on some manifold or forgot to flip the emergency brake

of your car and watched it tumble from the aluminum car jack

that came with the used Nissan and the tire iron that never fit the spare,

the car that just has to make it eight more months,

just eight more months, whether you have done this all

during overtime or in the morning before your shift,

you still don’t know what it is, because the work

is still not finished, is only beginning, is learning to say

how much they mean to you, to wonder

why you need this breaking to say anything at all, before everything becomes dust,

and when they are nagging and failing, and asking a lot of you,

more than you have, and even when you can’t fathom what they mean,

and your father might very well be the strangest man on earth,

you must begin to commit to the long work, the long shift,

to repair what you’ve never had,

you must realize that there are no punch cards

to measure the dollars saved or lost. There is only rain

sleeting across the roof, falling from that front porch

where you never sat together long enough, you

never enjoyed sitting in that cramped house, you were trying

to escape. You have always been trying to escape. You never will, and now

knowing this you could begin to understand. You could begin to rejoice.





ABOUT THE POET 

Mike Good lives in Pittsburgh and serves as managing editor at Autumn House 
Press. Some of his recent poetry and book reviews can be found in or are 
forthcoming at Bennington Review, december, Five Points, Full Stop
PloughsharesSalamanderSOFTBLOW, Waxwing, and elsewhere, in addition to 
anthologies such as The Pittsburgh Neighborhood Guidebook (Belt Publishing). 
His work has received support from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and 
The Sun, and he holds an MFA from Hollins University. Find more at 
MikeGoodWrites.wordpress.com.


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.

Sunday, August 7, 2022

MELISSA CROWE—"OFTEN IN DREAMS SHE WAS MY GIRLFRIEND UNTIL I REMEMBERED, STILL ASLEEP, THAT IT WASN'T OKAY" (Issue 24)

OFTEN IN DREAMS SHE WAS MY GIRLFRIEND UNTIL I REMEMBERED, STILL ASLEEP, THAT IT WASN'T OKAY


Her hair was a miracle of brown-black curls,

spring coiled and shiny, and she sprayed it

with TRESemmé and hung it over the edge

of the bed while she slept on slumber-party

Saturday nights so she wouldn’t have to

wash it before church, and six birthmarks

half a shade darker than the rest of her creamy

olive skin traced her cheek from one earlobe

to the corner of her mouth. At video dances,

held tight to the stiffening groin of my own

partner, I watched her unfocused eyes

and bored frown while a punk kid, thick chain

padlocked around his neck, nuzzled hers.

Did she like it? I couldn’t tell, but when they

broke up, he carved her name into his chest

with the point of his knife. I still think of how

those letters, crooked and keloid, must mark him

after all these years. She introduced me,

kid from a canned-fruit-cocktail family,

to the pomegranate, its pressed paper rind,

those nestled ruby cells, each with a seed

that nearly filled it. So many tiny morsels

and so much work to get their meager juice.

But sweet enough to make it worth it. To stain

my hands, my face, my precious white cotton

leggings with the delicate cuff of lace at each ankle.

On a night when we’d driven three hours south

to walk the strange, thrilling circuit of the nearest

shopping mall (Orange Julius! The Gap!), we lay

on our stiff-sheeted hotel bed in our tank tops

and underwear, facing each other in the dark,

and she asked me if I’d ever thought about

kissing a girl. I said yes. Then we stayed silent

and still until morning, neither of us rolling over

to get comfortable or adjusting our hard pillows

or hanging our hair over the bed’s edge

to keep it neat. I could hardly hear her breathe.




ABOUT THE POET 

Melissa Crowe is the author of Dear Terror, Dear Splendor (University of 
Wisconsin Press, 2019), and her work has appeared recently or is forthcoming 
in Four Way Review, New England Review, Poetry Northwest, and Thrush
among other journals. She’s coordinator of the MFA program at UNCW, where 
she teaches poetry and publishing.


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.