HAN VANDERHART — "ODE TO KNOWING" (Issue 30)

Sugar House Review · Han VanderHart's, "Ode to Knowing"

ODE TO KNOWING

The orchard in my childhood: apple,

pear, cherry I fell from—and a plum tree

neglected every spring, a jelly fungus

taking the purple fruit. No soft plums

in the fridge. There was so much

I thought I could not have; obedience

I had to give. My child body, bruised.

My heart: kept like an abandoned fruit

tree, or a goat to a tether. I did not buck.

I did not bite. I stood in the long grasses.

I’ve since learned that a child cannot

provide. That fruit and animals both

need tending hands—hold me, comb me,

were words that for years I could not

say. But now I feel the wisteria around

my thighs. The landscape curls with relief.

There is ripe fruit in the shape of your mouth.

ABOUT THE POET 

Han VanderHart is a queer writer living in Durham, NC, under the pines. Their 

second poetry collection, Larks (Ohio University Press, 2025), was selected by 

Chanda Feldman as winner of the 2024 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize. Han is also 

the author of What Pecan Light (Bull City Press, 2021) and has essays and poetry 

published in Kenyon Review, The American Poetry Review, The Rumpus, AGNI, 

and elsewhere. Han hosts Of Poetry Podcast and, alongside Amorak Huey, coedits 

the poetry press River River Books.

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ELLA FLORES — "FIELD NOTES FROM THE CREATION MUSEUM" (Issue 30)

Sugar House Review · Ella Flores's, "Field Notes from the Creation Museum"

FIELD NOTES FROM THE CREATION MUSEUM

After the Tower of Babel diorama

    you arrive at a Kentucky nuclear

wasteland where mannequin Moses

    asks mannequin David, Why do I

suffer? A projector whirs the answer:

    a million CGI particles form a fully

adult, human male—No baby Adam.

    No diaper changing station

in the men’s bathroom. No stopping the field

    tripping students from prodding fertilized

egg models and life-sized fetuses. Or shoving

    their way through the Garden of Eden

exhibit to be first in line for the petting-zoo-food-

    court-equipped Ark, where a premium ticket

gets you the Deluge Experience and rainbows

    are kept to a minimum. Please leave

in twos, a placard points to the gift shop.

    In the humor section you buy a birthday

card with a unicorn nuzzling a brontosaurus

telling him, It doesn’t hurt.

Not really.

ABOUT THE POET 

Ella Flores is a poetry PhD candidate at SUNY Binghamton and has recent 

or forthcoming work in The Penn Review, DIAGRAM, Salamander, Hunger 

Mountain, and others.

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MIKE WHITE — "FAIRGROUND (OLD PHOTOGRAPH)" (Issue 30)

Sugar House Review · Mike White's, "Fairground (Old Photograph)"

FAIRGROUND (OLD PHOTOGRAPH) 

Given that the colors

must already be

imagined,

allow the mind’s eye

to erase

every last bobbing balloon,

and then subtract

the levitating strings.

Now keep

squarely in view

the clenched raised fists

of the stone-faced children.

ABOUT THE POET 

Mike White is the author of two prize-winning collections: How to Make a 

Bird with Two Hands (Word Works, 2012) and Addendum to a Miracle 

(Waywiser, 2017). Individual poems have appeared in journals, including Poetry, 

Ploughshares, The New Republic, The Yale Review, The Kenyon Review, The Iowa 

Review, Copper Nickel, Rattle, and previously in Sugar House Review. Originally 

from Canada, he now lives in Salt Lake City and teaches at the University of Utah.

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SEAN HILL — "WANT AT THE TRANSFER STATION" (Issue 30)

Sugar House Review · Sean Hill's, "Want at the Transfer Station"

WANT AT THE TRANSFER STATION

A slipping whistling sliding sound of a song

calls my attention at the City of Helena

Solid Waste Transfer Station where the sign reads

NO SCAVENGING Violators Will Be Prosecuted

where I was just moments ago with my seven-year-old

son and our recycling minding my own business

and with questions on my mind—Where will this

harvest from our garbage go? What will we reap?

What did we sow?—when your song found me and I

call my son’s attention to it. I want to share the singer

with my son in the middle of our recycling run to this

transfer station like when a jam from my youth

comes on the radio when we’re in the middle of our

erranding for things to bring home and I get excited.

I once heard the clear whistles of one of your eastern

cousins’ songs and thought it sang Hey young man, go away.

And once a friend said you sound like you’re singing a question;

he heard a rising call that I didn’t, and if it was, it would

have been uptalking seeking agreement, right? Since, what

question would you have? Aside from those questions of life—

how to keep your body safe and going in order to make

generations to come—those needs and drives, which may sit

in you not as questions. At any rate, I want him, my son,

to see you, the belter of the song that drops, a drawly

glissando or perhaps twangy vibrato, a western song,

with that bright bib, the yellow of a sunflower? Some flower?

Or maybe the yellow of detritus gathered with hope

of it getting a new use—an emptied laundry detergent

jug or Pacifico can? Not a question in my want,

what I mean is (trying to find you with my eye) I want

to show my boy not metaphors in the day but your coal black

necklace bold against that yellow reminding me of that boy-mensch

Charlie Brown’s shirt and your streaked mantle of browns

and blacks on your wings and back matching the dried grasses

and the shadows they cast to keep you hid in your ground feeding

and ground nesting habits and hard to find in this valley east

of MacDonald Pass and the continental divide in this watershed

with your spill of those liquid slipping notes in a run that floats

open over the open land next to the roll-off dumpsters.

ABOUT THE POET 

Sean Hill is the author of Dangerous Goods and Blood Ties & Brown Liquor, 

and the forthcoming collection, The Negroes Send Their Love. His poems have 

appeared in Callaloo, Harvard Review, The Oxford American, Poetry, Tin House, 

and numerous other journals, and in several anthologies including Black Nature 

and Villanelles. Hill lives in southwestern Montana with his family and is an 

associate professor of creative writing at the University of Montana.

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LAUREN CAMP — "AS LONG AS I SEE" (Issue 30)

Sugar House Review · Lauren Camp's “As Long as I See”

AS LONG AS I SEE

Onto the same valley, I keep looking. Impossible that

the future is instantly changed.

Empty land will continue

to set slight

wind. I woke

at dawn and asked the flat

dark to sing me

its wings. Reason could be the lantern

of owls. I went mapping the body-blood, and escaped

to previous versions and margins

where I reappear in echo. Now I look

at this valley straight across, gold fields

and leaf flutter, fences, lulled cows. Aluminum trailers wriggle

and flex dirt roads. Each shift of peaks and triangulated

pine. The moon curls, and circles

slink about on the pond.

Time widens along west.

Before this, I would have to poke silence—

expecting much to be the only value.

I am looking at the valley because that is what there is

to do and it is already justified. I have buried my father.

Birds scale sand dunes in unison.

ABOUT THE POET 

Lauren Camp serves as New Mexico Poet Laureate. She is the author of eight 

books of poetry, most recently In Old Sky (Grand Canyon Conservancy, 2024). A 

former Astronomer-in-Residence at Grand Canyon National Park, she was a 

finalist for the Arab American Book Award, New Mexico-Arizona Book Award, 

and Adrienne Rich Award. Her poems have been translated into Mandarin, 

Turkish, Spanish, French, and Arabic. LaurenCamp.com

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SUPHIL LEE PARK — "HERE ARE SOME FLOWERS" (Issue 30)

Sugar House Review · Suphil Lee Park's “Here Are Some Flowers”

HERE ARE SOME FLOWERS

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

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LIZZY 柯 (Ke) POLISHAN — "TRANSDIFFERENTIATION" (Issue 30)

Sugar House Review · “transdifferentiation” by Lizzy 柯 (Ke) Polishan

TRANSDIFFERENTIATION

why not talisman your body with cheap charms?

chew the unspeakable 桃子? sail off in search of ambrosia?

golden apples? a holy grail? you can’t count

on transmigration to pour your soul back into a human vessel / you can’t count on

your honda’s transmission to hold until you get home / if metempsychosis is

stolen immortality, you feel no remorse / do you really want to return

from cosmic comatose bliss to be a long-stem rose or some other symbol

of someone else’s love? ask sisyphus to trace the shape

of his callouses and tell you how happy he feels / you can wait for late to retronym

your proper name, bingeing bake off, knitting snood after snood, or you can find

the magical grackles / they’ll exchange your freudian regressions for

a child-sized skeleton / fresh lenses / firm skin... / up to you / you are now approaching

the point of radioactive decay / a half-life crisis / the instant of your transformation

into clever lead / if you’re clever enough, you can pestle yourself

a helichrysum-meets-cicada-skin cocktail / name it ‘transdifferentiation’ /

delirious, you’ll delete freckles! / sunspots! / buy crop

tops again! / if a jellyfish can do it so can you—

channel your inner turritopsis dohrnii & unsheathe your spine! /

just like sliding a toothpick from your favorite amuse-bouche /

convert to a glossy polyp / a blob / slippery / shimmery / reborn

on the seafloor / on the seafloor / surrender / you’ll love what you’ve become

ABOUT THE POET 

Lizzy 柯 (Ke) Polishan’s poems appear in Gulf Coast, Passages North, EPOCH, 

RHINO, Tupelo Quarterly, petrichor., Poet Lore, Rust + Moth, Greensboro Review,

Pacifica, and others. She is a guest editor at Palette, a poetry reader at Psaltery & 

Lyre, and the managing editor at River & South Review. She is the author of 

A Little Book of Blooms (2020). She lives in Pennsylvania with her husband.

ABOUT SUGAR HOUSE REVIEW 

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GAYLORD BREWER — "TO S., A NOTE ON FOOD ETIQUETTE" (Issue 29)

Sugar House Review · Gaylord Brewer's, "To S., a Note on Food Etiquette"

TO S., A NOTE ON FOOD ETIQUETTE

                                     after Alan Dugan

Let’s say for example, if, as you hover

at the edge of the raucous kitchen,

nibbling the last slice of, say, apricot tart

others paid for, openly advertising

you’ve no dinner for yourself, someone offers,

for sake of argument, half a beautiful omelet

clearly intended entirely for himself,

as perhaps he has fasted all day,

you should understand this generosity

as social invitation, and whether or not

you twice demur—both plate and table—

it remains inappropriate that the dish

later disappear from the counter

as if by a thief ’s hand, as breaking of bread

is how community is nourished, relationships

are healed, culture and custom paid forward,

and if you do choose to snag the food

when no one’s looking and make a run

for your closet of a studio, this omelet

made with love from fresh eggs, mushrooms,

peas purchased at the farmers market,

say peas shelled just that afternoon

and a walk to town for a warm baguette

all at the expense of the cook’s time,

and say moreover, to our point, it is a sublime

omelet, lightly browned on the outside,

unbelievably butter-rich and luxurious inside,

possibly the best goddamn omelet

ever made in human history and the maker

ends his meal hungry as reward for kindness,

consider that you might at a point in time

at least mention having eaten, maybe even

enjoyed the fucking eggs you didn’t deserve,

simply acknowledge the gesture.

Just a thought I wanted to share.

ABOUT THE POET 

Gaylord Brewer has been a professor at Middle Tennessee State University

for three decades. The most recent of his 17 books of poetry, fiction, criticism, 

and cookery is a just-published collection of brief nonfiction, Before the 

Storm Takes It Away (Red Hen Press, 2024).

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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.

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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

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HANNAH TREASURE — "MELATONIN GUMMIES, FOUR STARS" (Issue 29)

Sugar House Review · Hannah Treasure's, "Melatonin"

MELATONIN GUMMIES, FOUR STARS

These work—I take one every night instead of getting stoned.

The taste is fake strawberry, in a good way, like a snow cone.

I feel rested when I wake up, and I remember my dreams.

I only took one star off because in the last dream my husband

found out he had gotten another woman pregnant a long time ago

and it was very painful for me. To see the new little boy as

his carelessness. There wasn’t a way to express my anger

that he hadn’t prioritized our future before we’d met.

I just kept feeding the kid cereal, wondering how I’d know

when he was full.

ABOUT THE POET 

Hannah Treasure is a lecturer in the department of English at Clemson

University. She received her MFA in poetry from Brooklyn College in 2020. 

Her work appears in The Brooklyn Rail, Ghost City Review, Sonora Review, 

No Dear, Volume Poetry, and elsewhere.

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KASEY JUEDS — "CEDAR CLOSET" (Issue 29)

Sugar House Review · Kasey Jueds's, "Cedar Closet"

CEDAR CLOSET

I didn’t want to write that place

with its daughterless walls

smelling of lost forests, of bafflement.

There the moths would not.

There, the small hands

I smoothed along the boards

to quiet them.

When I pressed my limbs between

the weight of winter

coats: no door, no secret

I could find. And still

those planks with their voiceless

noise, their fevered blush

like the fur of the first dog

I loved. Darting into long grass

in the field behind the house, she’d

vanish, return. Always, then,

it was August, the end

of a road that ran straight

for miles.

I can still make

a church of my fingers

to call back the burrs

snagged in her coat. I can make

a steeple, reaching

toward untouchable blue.

But do I make that closet, the want

and gone of it, where

no one almost never—

or the field, where wind

keeps erasing

the sentence in my head: the one

that begins with winter

and ends in a kneeling

that leaves no mark on the earth.

ABOUT THE POET 

Kasey Jueds is the author of two collections of poetry, both from the University

of Pittsburgh Press: Keeper, which won the 2012 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, 

and The Thicket. She lives in a small town in the mountains of New York state 

with one human and one spotty dog.

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KIERON WALQUIST — "THE OREGON TRAIL® + ALL OF MY DEATHS" (Issue 29)

Sugar House Review · Kieron Walquist's, "The Oregon Trail + All of My Deaths"

THE OREGON TRAIL + ALL OF MY DEATHS

An accidental buckshot, broken leg [couldn’t bother to bandage the

bullet-hole or change clothes], cholera, dehydration, dysentery, the

devil I’m sure dulling the disk, exhaustion, fever, foes, the fire I forgot

to gut until I was engulfed, greed, grief, the goddamn horse taking

off, the horse-kick, the humor in dying infinitely, insufficient funds,

the jaws of a rattlesnake, bad jar of beans, karma, knife-wound,

lash of sunlight, lily of the valley, measles, mosquitos, nightmares,

the promise of Oregon, an oasis being my heat-pickled brain, the

pioneer life, quarrels, questions, quitting, risks, my toothpick

schooner riding over rocks, river crossings, starvation, stupid shit,

typhoid, terrible luck, twisted lung, unarmed + under-fire, ushered

again into violence, vanity, vengeance, very wet-behind-the-ears, the

weather, want, wishful thinking, X marking the spot, yes when it was

no, yellow flowers, the zigzag of the computer mouse, zooming over

information, zero communication, your belief in me.

ABOUT THE POET 

Kieron Walquist (he/they) is a queer, neurospicy poet + visual artist from

mid-Missouri. He holds an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis + is

currently a PhD candidate at the University of Utah. Their work has received 

support from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Monson Arts, + 

Vermont Studio Center. LOVE LOCKS, their first chapbook, is out with 

Quarterly West. He lives in Salt Lake City.

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VIOLETA GARCIA-MENDOZA—"SOLASTALGIA NOCTURNE" (Issue 29)

Sugar House Review · Violeta Garcia-Mendoza's, "Solastalgia Nocturne"

SOLASTALGIA NOCTURNE

It’s late spring & earlier I overfilled the bird feeders

while thinking about karma, anticipating hungry

wildlife, insomnia. Each night’s its own soft throat

& lying awake I distract myself from past selves

by playing catch & release with Ring doorbell alerts.

In the driveway: deer, red fox, raccoons

slipping between arborvitae & basketball hoop.

In the distance, lightning ironworks the sky:

decades of rooflines, centuries of oaks. Everything

is temporary is a kind of curse where existence stirs

like weather, where survival plots in terms of forage,

tunnel, shelter. These hours, I’m sorry to be human

with our trademark cornering factors; I know

every apology creates its own future problems.

The night animals feed, then pixelate

back into the screen’s consolation wild.

ABOUT THE POET 

Violeta Garcia-Mendoza is a Spanish-American poet, teacher, and suburban 

wildlife photographer. Her poetry has appeared in numerous literary journals, 

and in 2022, she received a grant from the Sustainable Arts Foundation. She is 

a member of the Madwomen in the Attic Writing Workshops at Carlow 

University. Violeta lives with her husband, teenage children, and pack of rescue 

dogs on a small-certified wildlife habitat in western Pennsylvania. Songs for the 

Land-Bound is her debut collection, out from June Road Press in 2024. VioletaGarciaMendoza.com

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ERICA DAWSON—"SONNET AFTER AUTOCORRECT TURNS WHY DO YOU LIVE SO FAR AWAY TO WHY DO YOU LOVE SO FAR AWAY" (Issue 29)

Sugar House Review · Erica Dawson's, "Sonnet after autocorrect turns why do you live so far away to why do you love so far away"

Sonnet after autocorrect turns why do you live so far away? to why do you love so far away?

i love at close range. you leave room for myth,

ancient rock formations, riddles, the changing width

of oceans at high tide. i cannot touch,

in my memory, your taste or feel you such

as one feels their own shadow’s crouch. [distance,

you have failed me.] i haven’t seen you since

you left my bed. my heart has not yet grown

fonder or hardened into fist-sized stone.

it’s still an instrument of life, a beat

and then a beat. in the atria grooves

you must acquire how to love me. ride

your vanishing. i’m the fixed one who moves

in place. picture my face on our night street

rinsed clean at dawn. then love. love then abide.

ABOUT THE POET 

Erica Dawson is a neurodivergent African-American poet living in the

Baltimore-DC area. She is the author of three books of poetry, most recently, 

When Rap Spoke Straight to God (Tin House, 2018). Her poems have appeared 

in Best American Poetry, Orion, The Believer, VQR, and other journals and 

anthologies. She loves her dog Stella, Wu-Tang Clan, and anything cooked with 

cardamom.

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.