IBE LIEBENBERG—"THINGS THEY WANT AFTER FIRE" (Issue 23)

Sugar House Review · Ibe Liebenberg's "Things They Want After Fire"

THINGS THEY WANT AFTER FIRE

to the dog I found under a bed

Hands offer
compressions

to swollen body.
Mouth around

blackened nose
expires. The taste

of failure stains
the hole dug

beside a tree for you.
At the station,

in my room
I shovel through sleep.

Like a bad obituary,
plagiarize me better.

 

ABOUT THE POET 

Ibe Liebenberg lives in Chico, California and works as a firefighter and a lecturer at Chico State University. He is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation and is currently enrolled in the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. He has been published in The Journal of Chickasaw History and Culture, Chico State Universities Multicultural Echoes Literary Magazine, and The Threepenny Review.

 

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.

KIYOKO REIDY—"PORTRAIT OF MY BROTHER WITH HIS HABIT" (Issue 23)

Sugar House Review · Kiyoko Reidy's "Portrait of My Brother with His Habit"

PORTRAIT OF MY BROTHER WITH HIS HABIT

After Nick Flynn

Though the internet claims
it takes twenty-one days
to form a new habit, I am here
to tell you it takes only a single
moment of choice, then a lifetime
to unmake—powder
falling up through a slip
of sunlight into his nose or a loose
handful of pills, dead white
bugs in his palm; without sense
of where his body began or how
it could end he bent
the world to his will: like a cartoon
he traced his wants onto air
and they solidified, he drew windows
on his arms and they filled in with stars,
black holes the size of a needle’s
point, tiny mouths with
their unremitting hungers, and all
the while I went on assuming
the worst, though what I imagined
was the worst was not, and even
once he told me I couldn’t really
imagine—a body of doors swinging
loosely on their hinges, the twenty-one
days coming and coming again, an army
of days that were all the day
he was going to quit, the day he’d
rewind, walking backward
through every opening he’d made until
he stood at the entrance
to himself, the first door
of this life I couldn’t imagine,
and finally he’d slam it shut,
all the other doors behind it
falling like dominoes.

ABOUT THE POET 

Kiyoko Reidy is an MFA candidate at Vanderbilt University, where she also serves as the editor in chief for the Nashville Review. Her poems and nonfiction can be found in the Chestnut Review, Red Rock Literary Review, Berkeley Poetry Review, Trampset, Driftwood Press, America’s Best Emerging Poets, and elsewhere.

 

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.

M. CYNTHIA CHEUNG—"WITNESS" (Issue 23)

Sugar House Review · M. Cynthia Cheung's "Witness"

WITNESS

Shards of bald cypress
wreck the sky. Each night’s
turmoil of feral hogs stiffens
in mud. Behind the metal
grate, the trapped boar
swells and surges, all
hackles and fever, tusks
bursting the leaf litter.

The game warden’s rifle draws
a line between his eye and ear.

This is how I imagine
ice splits granite,
or the way Newton’s
second law translates:
the sudden posture
of a force accelerating
into nothing but mass.

 

ABOUT THE POET 

M. Cynthia Cheung is an internist who trained at the University of California, Los Angeles, and currently practices hospital medicine in Texas. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Journal of the American Medical Association, Zócalo Public Square, Hawaii Pacific Review, and The Ekphrastic Review, among others. She was previously a finalist for the Michael E. Debakey Poetry Contest, and is on the judging panel for 2021.

 

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.

OWEN MCLEOD—"LOVE'S THERMAL SERVICES" (Issue 23)

Sugar House Review · Owen McLeod's "Love’s Thermal Services"

LOVE’S THERMAL SERVICES

The most important things?
Grass long and weedy, wheels
of abandoned bicycles, Saturn’s rings,
fruits that can be washed and dried,
ears, lightning, singing, glass jars
filled with cut flowers, gold, green,
select industries, certain cars, pencils
and the scent of their shavings.

What’s the problem?
The destruction of air and earth
and of the summer camp where you hid
in the woods beautifully, beautiful, sinful—
your little heart foaming
like a cake of pink soap.

ABOUT THE POET 

Owen McLeod teaches philosophy at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania. He has this recurring anxiety dream in which he is alive.

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.

KATE NORTHROP—"JITTERY NOCTURNE" (ISSUE 22)

Sugar House Review · Kate Northrop's "Jittery Nocturne"

JITTERY NOCTURNE

Outside after a bad dream —no stars,
no canopy of leaves— just streets
 

and down those streets, like large
flat rocks in the middle of a stream, my neighbors’ houses.

•

But sometimes, walking around, straight ahead
on sidewalks, I correspond with arguments

swimming at the heart of houses, and move parallel

to their interiors: old clothes, crates,
canned peaches —everything

sinking to the bottom of the bottom of houses.

•

Rain, starting slowly, thuds

the metal bottom of a boat— a sound you know in the middle
of the night in houses. And there’s a current pulling

at the boat, the movement of debt— we do not

own these houses.

•

Often I am brushed on the leg —right in the kitchen!—
by a fish, yet my sisters trust the integrity of houses.

Lately I’m happy to be having the sex I am having
most often now, inside of houses.

Those tiny, inquisitive sea horses, flickering
here and there— how they addressed us we will remember in houses.

•

Later, like an allowance, the moon comes round: fat, white

Later the moon floods
the alleys, empties the rooms of our houses.

•

How I know I am not happens most often in houses:
creaking the floorboards, slowly breathing in houses.

 

ABOUT THE POET

Kate Northrop is a recipient of the Jeannette Haien Ballard Writers Award and fellowships at the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo. Her recent poetry collections are Clean (Persea Books) and cuntstruck (C and R Press). Northrop is a contributing editor at The American Poetry Review and teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Wyoming. She lives in Laramie, WY.

 

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.