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. 

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. 

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. 

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.

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. 

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. 

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.