Thursday, June 1, 2017

ALICIA MOUNTAIN, "HEROIC CROWN: QUEER SONNETS"




HEROIC CROWN: QUEER SONNETS
                       
                                  after Beyoncé's Lemonade

1.

In a winter dream, months ago
she came. The queen, braided and
furred, promising a betrayal song when
the time was most right, promising
your betrothal would only bend a season
for me. This train town has a howling
in the night. It is a beehive alive with
honeysuckle whispers, sweet stinging.
Your maps don’t stray like I do,
but we were both drawn to scale,
traced by your fingers for a path,
we both fold small for safekeeping.
Her prophesy said, run from your want—
whatever most right was, it waited.


2.

Whatever most right was, it waited
until I skipped town south to sink in,
to get me sprung on spring-heavy air
like breath against neck, like my long
white girl hair sticking to your sweat.
Daytime bathroom belt buckle betrayal.
Bodies inside bodies love, your hands.
Now all I have here is Virginia, weeks
and weeks of alone, in breathy Virginia.
When we were in love, men would ask
if we were sisters. What a wicked way
to deny what was already buried and plain.
How I set a snare for the life they saw
between us, held tight like too much hope.



3.

Between us, held tight like too much hope,
and thunder sounds spanking the hills,
all year was a racket. House party borrowed
bass beats and cheap tequila with no chaser,
jumping in aqueducts, down on my knees
in the locker room shower, shoved up against
locked office doors with you. Landlock
that wouldn’t hold. Drive me to the stolen
land, lake big enough to be an ocean. He can
come—he who’s in here too, to whom you
are promised, the smoke dozing in your
rafters. He can sleep in the backseat if you
give me directions. Some rough-faced boy
I would never try to steal you from.



4.

I would never try to steal you from
the hills so steep I lose my breath,
where I breathe you to keep going.
The queen tells me not to drink the
tidal push and pull from some mug
left on your bedside. Who mouthed it
last? What solemnity and grace did
they avow? To what am I entitled?
Did you name your book volcano?
The queen promises an overripe
rupture, full-court press. The most
I can say is no one’s too old for
high tops, the high-water mark,
the shore I couldn’t start to see.



5.

The shore I couldn’t start to see.
The storm I couldn’t feel until it had
soaked me through, wrung me out.
Let my pink water-wrinkled hands lift you
onto the countertop. I write to you  
from the counter at the Waffle House
closest to the Jefferson Plantation.
I watch myself on a security monitor
swiveling, my hat turned backwards.
I think I will always look like a child
when I am alone. The nearest train,
whose tracks I can’t find, stops sinister at
Lynchburg—named after a man. Hard to
believe the less terrible, even when it’s true.



6.

Believe the less terrible. Even when it’s true
that I have been sweating everyday,
shrinking a little, drinking a little less.
Even then, I wonder if my body is more
possessive of you than of itself. At the
gym I drink watered-down lemonade.
To start the stair master’s churning,
I choose a setting called Life Quest and
level 5 because what am I trying to win?
The queen in my ear doesn’t need me to bow
my head to her. The stairs collapse and
collapse beneath me. Does he build rough
hills to climb for you? Do you recognize
this book is a monument to touch?



7.

This book is a monument to touch
even with its hands in its pockets.
Even with your hair in your eyes as
disguise, there is no making public
how we push and pull in dark corners.
The beehive whispers when it sees our
hands touch, the train town howls and
howls. The rough face smiles beside yours.
Lick my teeth in the daylight. Still no
chaser. Still no closer to extinguishing
the bolt of my lightning you hold captive.
I have held the bright storm of you
hot in my hands. I would do it again,
however quick, however long it lasts.



8.

However quick, however long it lasts,
this hot breath season is for growing.
Have you cut your hair at all? Have you
turned his rough jeans into cutoffs you wear
on weekends? Is any day not a weekend
for you when the high desert burns off
its chill by lunchtime? I offer to trade you
a poem for the story of the place we pressed
our bodies together. We’ll write twin books
to outlast this. We’ll press them cover to cover.
I will tell my book that it was once in love,
even if it doesn’t remember fitting against
you as it slept. I don’t think many people
remember my body, the folded map of it.



9.

Remember my body. The folded map of it
spread out on the floor at your mother’s
house. Remember the winding road to
the rose garden and just going slow together,
stopping to smell sunscreen on my neck.
The queen says in these breathy weeks away
my panting for you has been forgotten.
But you started wearing my deodorant and,
at some rough point, he probably started
wearing it, too. In Virginia I have run out.
I am grocery store, I am shampoo as soap,
I am very little toothpaste. If I ever return
to our train town, I’ll smell like him—
whoever you love. He belongs beside you.



10.

Whoever you love, he belongs beside you.
The rupture is a slow roiling, the moan
let go by a falling tree. My volcano seeps
fire blood love up to the surface so it can
cool and dissipate, so it can run downhill.
The queen in my ear breathes heavy that I am
alone at a desk, taking what doesn’t belong
to me. I come from a long line of betrayers
who have worn many rings and read prophesy
into desire. I pretend I am good. I would
get you lost in the hot forest, I would bring
lemonade, speak thief songs to you, panting.
The queen says enough, puts me to bed
lying in your honest kind of shade.



11.

Lying in your honest kind of shade
under moaning trees older than I’ll live
to be, I roll onto my belly in a final try
to say, come with me to the high desert
where our breath will be our breath and not
the springtime breathing for us. Pack a car
with most of what you need, rough-faced
trust, hands in pockets, body inside body,
toothpaste, tequila, map worn along its
creases, smoke in rafters. Come with me.
I try to say all this by getting to my feet,
by saying very little, saying I am not lost,
I swear. The queen says lostis a sort of
somewhere. Inside me there is a swarm.



12.

Somewhere inside me there is a swarm
that wants out. If this storm is electric,
if the power goes out, wait. What has
flashed across every spring-static sky
will come again. I have paid my leap year
debts and with what’s left, cook breakfast
hot in a kitchen, kneading something
and letting it rise. If I’m being honest
I don’t know that I ever saw your eyes.  
I don’t know if you put your mouth
to my neck without looking over my
shoulder. Who is more dispossessed
than the thief? How long have I been
keeping quiet when I want to howl?



13.

Keeping quiet when I want to howl
is old work, the day labor that never
breaks me even. In some accounting,
this was worth every minute of leisure,
of lemonade, of cool, sugared wanting.
The horizon puts her feet up, stretched
out across hills that bloom, even while
they burn. There is no other queen above
her. This is no return ticket between us.
I took my body with me, took my book.
I am not trying to be good. Double knot
your high tops, turn backwards your hat.
Walk the highest hill until you see that
what you buried can’t be driven out of me.


14.

What you buried can’t be driven out of me.
The train town grasses have grown tall and
mowing sounds put me back in the secret
in your mother’s house, where I would tell you
over again how I have broken many things
in my thirst. I would lie on the floor and
give you my hands, give you my mouth,
try to hear you through your hair. Because
I am going to the desert, because you are not,
I am trying to remember your breath. I am told
we still look alike. I am told that every train town
has the same smoke in its rafters, the same
monuments, the same stairs collapsing and
collapsing, the same tide pulling at my belt.  



15.

In a winter dream, months ago,
whatever most right was, it waited
between us, held tight like too much hope.
I would never try to steal you from
the shore I couldn’t start to see.
Believe the less terrible, even when it’s true:
this book is a monument to touch,
however quick, however long it lasts.
Remember my body, the folded map of it.
Whoever you love, he belongs beside you,
lying in your honest kind of shade.
Somewhere inside me, there is a swarm
keeping quiet when I want to howl.
What you buried can’t be driven out of me.


ABOUT THE POET
Alicia Mountain is a queer poet and PhD candidate at the University of Denver. Her poems can be found in Guernica, jubilat, Prairie Schooner, Pleiades, Witness, and elsewhere. Alicia's work was nominated for a 2017 Pushcart Prize. Her unpublished full-length manuscript was a semi-finalist for the St. Lawrence Book Award and a notable manuscript for the BOAAT Book Prize. She received an Academy of American Poets Prize, an Idyllwild Arts Fellowship and a residency at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. Mountain earned her MFA at the University of Montana in Missoula.

ABOUT SOUND OF SUGARWe’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. 

Saturday, March 25, 2017

MAG GABBERT, "OXYCODONE" (ISSUE 14)



OXYCODONE

Mother of Pearl.

Porcelain rimmed
toilet seat
at the back of the 7-11.

Your spine dissolves
to Pixie Dust.

Your brain bursts
and shines
like yolk
swishing at the base.

You want to drink
from the bowl.

Your teeth
roll, jaw-
guttered marbles.

White
and thinness
of your skin.

The light
blue of your veins.

Florescent beams,
the chill
of piss-riddled tile.

Then
the layers break
to flakes.

ABOUT THE POET

Mag Gabbert is currently a PhD student in creative writing at Texas Tech University, and previously received my MFA from The University of California at Riverside. Her essays and poems have been published or are forthcoming in journals including 32 Poems, The Rattling Wall, The Rumpus, The Nervous Breakdown, LIT Magazine, Sonora Review, The Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review, among other venues. Mag is also an associate editor for Iron Horse Literary Review

ABOUT SOUND OF SUGAR

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. 

Wednesday, March 8, 2017

JOHN A. NIEVES, "SPEEDING" (ISSUE 14)



SPEEDING

The music in the car muted the rain
on the road save the wiper blades’

                        repetitive thuds. No headlights, no
                        taillights, no deer or traffic signals.

Alone, out here, is part of the landscape.
The wind buffets me across

                        the asphalt’s long shine. The stereo
                        swears the world is as soft as lace, but

I don’t love anyone. Outside, the world
the world is as soft as lace. The ghosts

                        of train tracks clack under my tires. The milemarkers
                        streak green skyward into night.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:


John A. Nieves has poems forthcoming or recently published in journals such as: Cincinnati Review, Pleiades, Crazyhorse, The Literary Review, Verse Daily and Passages North. His first book, Curio, won the Elixir Press Annual Poetry Award Judge’s Prize and came out in early 2014. He’s an assistant professor of English at Salisbury University. John received his MA from USF and his PhD from the University of Missouri.


ABOUT THE SOUND OF SUGAR:

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. 

Saturday, February 25, 2017

Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter: Or Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances by Elizabeth A. I. Powell
(Anhinga Press, 2016)

Reviewed by Jamie Wendt
Elizabeth Powell’s second book of poetry, Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter: Or Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances, is a beautifully woven collection of prose poetry, lyric poetry, and memoir. She writes about the mixing of identities, particularly of Jewish and Gentile heritage as well as the combining of twins’ blood in the womb and the confusion of one’s self versus a doppelganger. Using Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, Powell continually returns to the idea of auto-correction and the censoring of identities as a means to contemplate the erasure of female voice and presence within the Loman family and within the poet’s own family experiences.

Powell raises issues of sexism and gender bias in theater and life, particularly for an unnamed daughter whose voice is silenced. She uses excerpts from Death of a Salesman as well as stage directions, theater typography, and lingo to intensify Loman’s death and the illicit relationship with the “Other Woman,” whose “Reckless Daughter,” a character of Powell’s imagining, sees the dysfunctional American family in a fresh light. Using symbolic moments from the play, such as Linda Loman’s stockings as a reminder of Willy’s affair in “How to Sew an Unhemmed Day,” Powell questions what the American Dream means for women in this play as they are repeatedly cast as “Other.” Women's lines are cut-off or ignored, or they are simply written out of the play or reduced to the role of understudy.

Death of a Salesman and the poet’s memoir collide in a theatrical understanding of American families. Powell acknowledges that an actor/actress, extra in the play, or even audience member are at times the same, so there is often a blurring of reality and fiction. In a series of sonnets titled “The Understudy’s Soliloquies,” she plays with the idea of salesmen putting on a show and American business as an act. In the first sonnet, she writes,

    The photo on top of Father’s coffin was from before the creditcrunch,    a portrait taken for a New York Times article on American business.    Father fake-smiled from the frame before his final stage left, his mistress    in the back made eye contact with the idea concealed behind journalistic    facts […]

Poems such as “Accident Report,” “Set Design: What the Door Knows,” and “Traveling Salesman in Providence” are directly in conversation with Death of a Salesman, and the poet uses Loman’s story to talk about her own father and the life and death of his American Dream. In “What Death Said,” Powell imagines her father’s thoughts as he is dying and his concerns about who will care for his body in death. The reader cannot help but be reminded of Loman’s death as Powell weaves her own story with that of Miller’s tragic American family.

Powell understands that people perceive the world in part based on the stories they hear, so if the reckless daughter is silenced, the audience misses part of the story. In the title poem at the end of the book in the section titled “Act 5. To Further Understand I May Not be Human at All,” Powell writes,

    Every salesman tries on so many faces,     they lose their own in the road’s empty spaces.     I was a secret stuck inside a secret. You kept    tabulating yourself in me. I wept    for the curtain’s endless rising    on your death. The morning shining    in through the kitchen window.    The past could not enter, nor foreshadow.

The recklessness of the daughter lies in the fact that she wants her story told, so as not to be erased from the plot of her family’s yearning for the American Dream. These poems—full of rhyme, longing, memory, and forgiveness—make for both an incredibly original book and a nuanced rethinking of the classic Death of a Salesman.


Jamie Wendt is a graduate of the University of Nebraska Omaha MFA program. Her poetry has been published in various literary journals, including Lilith, Raleigh Review, Minerva Rising, and Saranac Review. Her essays on Jewish writing have been published in Green Mountains Review and The Forward. She contributes book reviews for the Jewish Book Council. Wendt teaches high school English and lives in Chicago with her husband and daughter. Find her at JamieWendt.WordPress.com.

Friday, February 24, 2017

LINDSAY ADKINS, "THE PACKAGE" (ISSUE 14)



THE PACKAGE

She is labeling every Last Time,
tucking each one away.
The doctor leaves the room for a

 place where he can be of some use
and she wonders about her liver,
what it looks like spotted

or even unspotted—
she’s never seen it before
and now it is killing her.

 They know what to do with
the body, but what are the rituals
for a half-eaten jar of peaches

at the back of the fridge? The comb
with her hair still in it? The coat
hanging limp by the side door?

Three weeks ago she ordered
a new green blouse. It’d be at the
house by now.

How simple—to open a box,
know what’s inside.

ABOUT THE POET

Lindsay Adkins’ work has been published with The 2River View, Muddy River Poetry Review, the Aurorean, Glass Mountain, among others. She is also a poetry editor over at Vine Leaves Literary Journal. During the day, she works in NYC at Random House Publishing Group. At night, Lindsay spends most of her time battling her penchant for noodles, and losing.

ABOUT THE SOUND OF SUGAR:

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. 

Friday, January 20, 2017

ACE BOGGESS, "'DO YOU REGRET WHAT YOU'VE DONE?'" (ISSUE 14)



“DO YOU REGRET WHAT YOU'VE DONE?”

                                  —questionnaire

if regret is mourning
if regret is the lie
we tell ourselves when sleep won’t come
if regret takes blurry photographs
in black & white
posts them on Facebook
for many to ignore
if regret sings in the shower
a happy song to hide
the chiming undertones of operatic death
if it scrapes blood off highways &
erases the scar on my thumb
if it rolls the boulder up
if it laughs
at inappropriate moments
in the best of company
if someone says “regret!” &
means it without a definition
if a man dies clinging
to empty absent moments
from his youth
if regret is a pause upon waking
if regret is a pause before rest
if regret is life without mercy
spent daily wearing the lion’s skin

ABOUT THE POET

Ace Boggess is the author of two books of poetry: The Prisoners (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2014) and The Beautiful Girl Whose Wish Was Not Fulfilled (Highwire Press, 2003). His novel, A Song Without a Melody, is forthcoming from Hyperborea Publishing. His writing has appeared in Harvard Review, Mid-American Review, Rattle, River Styx, North Dakota Quarterly, and many other journals. He lives in Charleston, WV. 

ABOUT THE SOUND OF SUGAR:

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. 

Wednesday, January 11, 2017

EDWARD MAYES, "UNTIL JUST SECONDS AGO, IF I MISSPOKE" (ISSUE 14)



UNTIL JUST SECONDS AGO, IF I MISSPOKE

Until just seconds ago, if I misspoke
And if I now stand corrected, or
An understanding finally of rain, as

If all the many deaths were the hailstones
That hit the olive trees last June, a histogram
Of death, a moment between stet and

Everyone else in a hurry, someone’s
Clamor trumping someone else’s clamor,
The clumsiness of something as simple

As night fall, into a day not unbroken,
And if it’s a sleep we can’t speak
About, the gnat clouds that try to lose

Their g’s, or to say the t in hatch, or would
That be a blot on one’s escutcheon, a drip
Of fresh red paint on the architrave, what

Warning, what bells rang in the shtetls, and
If we all are a bad batch, proof of the existence
Of bad gods, the kind that glitch, the kind

That botch, and us, apostatic and eldritch,
Seeing more glass through the glass, an armistice
Only for an instant, wet and worried and worn.


Until nearly daybreak night fell; steed, stud, arrest, instant, understand, static,
prostitute, insist, ecstasy, system; stage, stance, stanch, stanchion, stanza, stet,
circumstance, constant, cost, distant, extant, oust, restharrow; stalag, shtetl, apostasy,
switcheroo, bedstead, armistice (arm-stopping), solstice (sun-stopping); epistyle,
architrave; steer, stern; apostrophe; Pär Fabian Lagerkvist, Nobel Prize 1951

ABOUT THE POET


Edward Mayes’ poems have appeared or are forthcoming in many journals and magazines, including The Southern Review, The New Yorker, APR, Kenyon Review, Best American Poetry, Agni, Harvard Review, and others. His books of poetry include First Language (Juniper Prize, University of Massachusetts Press) and Works and Days (AWP Prize in Poetry, University of Pittsburgh Press). Edward lives in Hillsborough, NC and Cortona, Italy with his wife, the writer Frances Mayes. Their latest collaboration is The Tuscan Sun Cookbook (Clarkson Potter).

ABOUT THE SOUND OF SUGAR

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.