DAN O'BRIEN—"THE FUTURE" (Issue 20)

Sugar House Review · Dan O'Brien's "The Future"

THE FUTURE

Stopped paying my bills. Stopped filling my cavities, writing my poems
and  plays,  etc.  No  more  prizes.  No  more  mortifying  myself  with
drinking, running, porn. The sexual experiences I’d never experience
now. Reading made me sick; I watched the screen. Unable to encounter
my own daughter deeply. Instead I set my mind against the whetstone
and limped around the ward, wheeling my blinking beeping luggage of
dangling  fluids.  Living  in  the  minutes  between  thumb-pumps  of
Dilaudid. Injections of Ativan. Visitations from the 3 a.m. vampire
-phlebotomists. Blowing into the plastic flute to levitate the magic ball
that forestalls pneumonia. My wife came and went. Through windows
the desert khaki all but blinding. The arterial freeways ferrying masses
into the mountains. When was my first real step after? When will be
my first word?

 

ABOUT THE POET 

Dan O’Brien’s three poetry collections, published in the US (Hanging Loose Press & Measure Press) and in the UK (CB Editions), are War Reporter (winner of the UK’s Fenton Aldeburgh Prize; shortlisted for Forward Prize for a First Collection), Scarsdale, and New Life. His fourth poetry collection, Our Cancers, is forthcoming from Acre Books (University of Cincinnati Press) in 2021.

 

ABOUT SUGAR HOUSE REVIEW 

We’ve loved reading the work that we’ve published (clearly), so now we want an opportunity to better hear our contributors. We will feature an audio recording of a poem from one of our issues, read by the poet and updated every couple of weeks. 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.

CHELSEA DINGMAN—"AT THE INSIGHT ULTRASOUND LAB FOR A BREAST CANCER SCREENING AFTER THE MAMMOGRAM FINDS IRREGULARITIES" (Issue 20)

Sugar House Review · Chelsea Dingman's "At the Insight Ultrasound Lab for a Breast Cancer Screening..."

AT THE INSIGHT ULTRASOUND LAB FOR A BREAST CANCER SCREENING AFTER THE MAMMOGRAM FINDS IRREGULARITIES

Imagine this:
white petals spilling from the walls.

The breast over the heart, exposed.
What can enter the heart, what cannot.

A family history without cancer.
Where I’ll be in a year. Where I won’t be.

The sound of the ultrasound machine, ticking
over each bombed-out cell. This room,
the calm gray-scale of a spa treatment center.

How technology breaks the body
into pixels. Into patterns. Into dim light.

My husband, not allowed in, waiting outside.
The hand that writes this. The wait & weight & wait.

The quiet before our lives change forever like the seconds
before a car crash.

The body’s wreckage. The beauty of it.

This record as archive as testimony as trivial.
How we’ll tell our children. How we’ll be remembered. How?

It was once thought possible for people to fly.
Heaven is a place I can’t imagine.

All the years I hated my body. The mirrors. The life it gives me.
A reason not to mourn. Any reason.

Five of us, together in future photos,
our bodies silhouetted by the sun.

 

ABOUT THE POET 

Chelsea Dingman’s first book, Thaw, was chosen by Allison Joseph to win the National Poetry Series (University of Georgia Press, 2017). Her second book, Through a Small Ghost, won the Georgia Poetry Prize and was published in February 2020. Her recent work can be found in The Southern Review, The New England Review, and The Kenyon Review, among others.

 

ABOUT SUGAR HOUSE REVIEW 

We’ve loved reading the work that we’ve published (clearly), so now we want an opportunity to better hear our contributors. We will feature an audio recording of a poem from one of our issues, read by the poet and updated every couple of weeks. 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.

ROBERT LYNN—"I WANTED TO BE A NEW YORK LOVE POEM" (Issue 20)

Sugar House Review · Robert Lynn's "I Wanted to Be a New York Love Poem"

I WANTED TO BE A NEW YORK LOVE POEM

To the woman getting off the train who offered to throw
away my browning banana peel. To these men posing

for photos with their cat on the beach. To Nancy screaming
at Coney’s seagulls: Today I am twenty-four and you don’t care.

To the seagulls who don’t care staring religious into January
winds. To the strangers and strangers and strangers still

catching Jillian as she passes out on the 77th Street station stairs.
Or again on the Brooklyn Bridge. Again in that forever hallway

connecting the 7 to the G in Queens. To the woman having trouble
modulating her voice on the Staten Island Ferry when she sees

the backlit statue: This is my America, Randall. I’m not going
back to Atlanta. Even to the person whispering I’m sorry

I’m sorry I’m sorry so softly to the rest of us as he jerks himself
off in the corner of this subway car. To the grace of his embarrassed

turning away. To everyone. I wanted to be a love poem to everyone
but I couldn’t. There was all this hardness. There were cops breaking

broomsticks in Abner Louima. They wanted us to forget. Hoped
we’d move away. Forget if Eric Garner sold loose cigarettes

or played center for the Nets. I spent the morning visiting a friend
in Rikers Island. Visited mostly its indifferent way of turning a day

into early evening with nothing to show for it but the waiting.
They broke his leg before they put him here. They already forgot.

They thought we’d be happy being love poems. We still might be
if we hold space for the way this love sharpens like a bottle

in a bar fight. I hold it firmly but gently like a cat on a beach.
The way you would a stranger falling back into you on the stairs.

None of us are going back, Randall. You hear me. None of us.

 

ABOUT THE POET 

Robert Lynn is writer and attorney from Fauquier County, VA. He is currently an MFA student in poetry at New York University. His poems have been featured or are forthcoming in American Literary Review, Antioch Review, Blackbird, New Ohio Review, and other publications. He lives in Brooklyn.

ABOUT SUGAR HOUSE REVIEW 

We’ve loved reading the work that we’ve published (clearly), so now we want an opportunity to better hear our contributors. We will feature an audio recording of a poem from one of our seven issues, read by the poet and updated every couple of weeks. 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.