In a gentler dream, I thumbed
each hydrangea socket wet
onto your palm, purple scabs right off
my lips, as if to not
press: look what you’ve done.
Its head, all eyes in the darkest
corner of summer.
In another, someone pointed out the rarity
of fathers in my poems and spoke around
all the frothy mothers. How to say I’m my father
in pastel has no better lyric place
to go to than silence?
In a less gentle dream, I dove face
first into a meadow made of bees so high
on flowers they recited the whole glossary.
I ran out of memory and started to abridge.
Ended up with acronyms on the cusp
of prescriptions.
An ocean of pistils drowned me
from afar.
From another dream, I uncrinkled
a twenty-dollar bill for tulips a touch
paler than the banana peel
still rotting in my sink.
ABOUT THE POET
Suphil Lee Park (수필 리 박 / 秀筆李朴) is a writer and translator from South
Korea. She is the author of Still Life (Factory Hollow Press, 2023), selected by
Ilya Kaminsky as the winner of the Tomaž Šalamun Prize, and Present Tense
Complex (Conduit Books & Ephemera, 2021), which won the Marystina
Santiestevan Prize. She also translated An Unraveling of One, an anthology
of pre-twentieth-century Korean women’s poetry (forthcoming from the
University Press of SHSU, 2027). Her work has appeared in The Kenyon
Review, The New Republic, Poetry, and elsewhere. Suphil-Lee-Park.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.
