Sunday, December 10, 2023

SEAN HILL—"POSTCARD FROM COMPASS ROSE" (Issue 26)

POSTCARD FROM COMPASS ROSE 

I’ve been traveling lately 
without you. Remember that 
time you said I was the flower 
drawn in the corners of maps 
by careful cartographers to give 
you guidance? A lodestar leading 
you so you may not be alone— 
may find your way back home. 
I got word you miss me, but it 
doesn’t show in your ways. Now 
you leave home with just your 
smartphone and trust in GPS— 
a guiding hand, a trying-to-be-
charming voice—and you’re made 
to feel comfortably lost never 
knowing where you are except 
on the way, as far as I can tell. 
Is that like falling in love? You 
know, my face was first traced 
by the winds I kissed the mouths 
of, as have many men—explorers 
and those who came after— 
looking to see the world. Best 
of luck along your way 
to where you want to be.



ABOUT THE POET 

Sean Hill is the author of two poetry collections, Dangerous Goods (Milkweed 
Editions, 2014), awarded the Minnesota Book Award in Poetry, and Blood Ties & 
Brown Liquor (UGA Press, 2008), named one of the Ten Books All Georgians 
Should Read in 2015 by the Georgia Center for the Book. Hill has received 
numerous awards, including fellowships from the Cave Canem Foundation, the 
Bush Foundation, Stanford University, and the National Endowment for the Arts. 
Hill’s poems and essays have appeared in Callaloo, Harvard Review, New England 
Review, Orion, Oxford American, Poetry, Tin House, and numerous other journals, 
and in over two dozen anthologies including Black Nature, Villanelles, and Cascadia 
Field Guide. A volume of poems selected from Blood Ties & Brown Liquor and 
Dangerous Goods has been translated and published in Korean. Hill lives in 
southwestern Montana with his family and is a professor of creative writing at the 
University of Montana. 



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.

Saturday, December 9, 2023

TROY OSAKI—"REVERSE LIGHTNING RALLY AT THE U.S. EMBASSY" (Issue 27)

REVERSE LIGHTNING RALLY AT THE U.S. EMBASSY

after Matt Rasmussen 

The president’s face on fire becomes a face 
again, unburnt. Smoke rolling skyward 

now caves in. Kara unclicks her lighter 
& every flame is inhaled into it. We lower 

the effigy. Take it apart. Guards uncircle us 
running backward into the gates. Their escrima 

sticks falling to their sides. We crumple protest 
signs & tuck them under our T-shirts. We cross 

the highway. Our backs charging into traffic. 
Our lifted fists sinking. In the air, our chant 

flings back at us. Imperialismo! Ibagsak! 
Manila Bay spits out sunlight, flattens. 

In the news, the Pentagon. Plans to airstrike 
Mindanao leap into an official’s mouth.


ABOUT THE POET 

The grandson of Filipino immigrants and the great-grandson of Japanese 
immigrants, Troy Osaki is a poet, organizer, and attorney. Osaki is a three-
time grand slam poetry champion and has earned fellowships from 
Kundiman, Hugo House, and Jack Straw Cultural Center. He was awarded 
a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry fellowship from the 
Poetry Foundation in 2022. A 2022–2023 critic-at-large for Poetry 
Northwest, his poetry has appeared in Crazyhorse, The Margins, Muzzle 
Magazine, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. He holds a Juris 
Doctor degree from the Seattle University School of Law where he interned 
at Creative Justice, an arts-based alternative to incarceration for youth in 
King County. He lives in Seattle, WA.



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.