ROS SEAMARK—"THE CREATION OF THE WORLD" (Issue 23)

Sugar House Review · Ros Seamark's "The Creation of the World"

THE CREATION OF THE WORLD

Brushing my teeth in a South Station bathroom is the closest I come
to being myself this morning. The buzzing florescents illuminating
my body bent here over the sink, my hands flashing under the faucet
is not a faithful copy of dawn like I am. I am so faithful. I am the sky’s
dog. At 6:03 a.m. I look in the mirror and I see words scratched into
the weather. I spit, and it’s clouds.

 

ABOUT THE POET 

Ros Seamark is a queer poet and translator from Central California.

 

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.

JEREMY ROCK—"ON THE DRIVE DOWN" (Issue 23)

Sugar House Review · Jeremy Rock's "On the Drive Down"

ON THE DRIVE DOWN

Behind the washed-out boards of a roadside
stand and those empty shacks with windows so thin
the glass becomes part of the room, lawn signs

remember lost elections, their letters uncollected
and warped with moisture. I’ve resolved never
to meet these houses away from the road for fear

they’d try to keep me, so I hold an even sixty-two
in a fifty-five and watch the pawn shops fade
to vulture feathers around pits of old rain. This trail

is seamed between homes, crosshatched the way
snow melts striated from a hood and I see, by the lights
lining the water, a bridge emerging as if it was just being

formed. I play the good moth and lope along, morning
wearing over me in dull blue streaks.

 

ABOUT THE POET 

Jeremy Rock is from Frederick, Maryland, and is a graduate of Salisbury University. He has work published in Ninth Letter, Waccamaw, The Shore, Stonecoast Review, Cider Press Review, The New Mexico Review, 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.

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.