STILL LIFE
There is a lemon.
There is a dachshund.
There is a broken board.
Consider the lemon,
yellow as the sun,
primal as the origin story of food.
Enter the dachshund,
squat and disproportionate circus
clown of dogs.
And now the broken board,
an accident in waiting.
What does that have to do with anything?
asks the new sweetheart,
a literalist, but strapping enough
to keep around for entertainment.
Have you never played the game
of lemon, dachshund, broken board?
Dachshund beats broken board.
Broken board beats lemon.
Lemon beats dachshund.
(The sour tongue, you ninny.)
It might surprise you to learn
that they all made me cry.
The dachshund for dying of bloat
after I let myself love her.
The lemon for a spray of citric acid in the eye
while brightening up the flounder.
The broken board for my sweetheart’s twisted ankle,
the fear that he would leave me.
But somehow, he stays.
He writes me a song called
A Lemon, A Dachshund, A Broken Board.
It is a song about none of these things.
It goes like this.
ABOUT THE POET
Christy Prahl is the author of the collection We Are Reckless (Cornerstone Press,
2023). A Best of the Net and two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her past and future publications include The Penn Review, Salt Hill Journal, Eastern Iowa Review, and
others. She has held residencies at both Ragdale and the Writers' Colony at Dairy
Hollow and is the founder of the PenRF reading series. She splits her time
between Chicago and rural Michigan and appreciates subways and siloes in equal
measure. More of her work can be found at
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.
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