ELI V. RAHM — "NOCTURNE" (Issue 29)

Sugar House Review · Eli V. Rahm's "Nocturne"

NOCTURNE 

I crawl along the side of a highway because I thought I saw a

glimpse of you in a dead fox. You—every pupil. How beautiful

orange looks

when wet. In Virginia, we used to fall asleep to foxes screaming.

It’s how they find each other, you’d say, your breath—spoons

of white on the glass. To find your mate, you continued, you have

to scream. This is how I’ve learned to find you—

crouching by smoke and stench, the pull of every passing car

nearly taking me with it. The fox—newspaper at the end of the

day—crumpled.

I reach down to touch the remains, as if to carry them somewhere

they won’t be churned, all paper shreds. I hear something like a

ragged cough and the fox jumps—one-eyed, bleeding

mouth. Then, gone—back to suburban woods. Next to my feet, the

other eye. I slide this slick offering into my coat pocket.

Take a piece of you home.

ABOUT THE POET 

Eli V. Rahm is a queer writer from Virginia. Eli is the recipient of the 2023 

Mary Roberts Rinehart Poetry Award and the 2020 Joseph A. Lohman III Award 

in Poetry. They’ve attended the Berlin Writers Workshop, the Juniper Summer Writing Institute, and the Tin House Winter Workshop. Eli’s work is featured or forthcoming in Door Is a Jar, Passages North, Bellingham Review, The Cortland 

Review, and The Academy of American Poets, among others. You can find them at Elisaurus.Carrd.co.

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.

JENNIFER MARTELLI — "BORROWING" (Issue 29)

Sugar House Review · Jennifer Martelli's "Borrowing"

BORROWING

For years, I studied German, the tongue

rooted in the back of my mouth, thick

and unnatural for me to even say

who I was: Ich bin, I am. A crow,

omnipotent and Eurasian, lodged

in the hollow at the secret end

of my throat where a church

waited, beyond my mouth’s arched

roof bones, nave to apse, raw

and red from this scrapy language.

Ich bin! Ich bin! I am! I am! The crow

built a nest out of Berlin black locust

twigs, big enough to house a clan

of birds. When they fly out to hunt,

I’ll wear their nest as a crown.

ABOUT THE POET 

Jennifer Martelli is the author of The Queen of Queens, winner of the Italian 

American Studies Association Book Award and named a “must-read” by the

Massachusetts Center for the Book and My Tarantella, also a “must-read,” and 

finalist for the Housatonic Book Award. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The 

Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, The Tahoma Literary Review, Folio, 

Jet Fuel Review, Tab: A Journal of Poetry, and elsewhere. Jennifer Martelli has 

received fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the 

Massachusetts Cultural Council. JennMartelli.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.