The Sound of Sugar....Brian Gilmore

Billy Bathgate (for chico)

 

    all i’ve got is this picture.

it could have been van der zee

gordon parks,

oggi ogburn fresh from

a chancellor williams’

shoot,

we are capable boys;

innocent,

up some small mountain

in the summertime

from that swamp of a city,

we couldn’t juggle balls

didn’t know any gangsters,

all we had was ice cold michelob and red juicy melon

holy like water.

we didn’t even know about the rattlesnakes

that i’ve now been told are all over that mountain.

all i’ve got is this picture.

    i could call up the crew,

though some of them are gone away now like wisps of smoke.

others are here but just floating on the skyline like kite

without string.

we were capable boys,

looking into the future as if we

would live long like frederick douglass

or c.l.r. james.

did i mention the michelob?

the red juicy melon

holy like water?

and how about those rattlesnakes?

all around us always now that we know

they are there.

all i’ve got is this picture.

unbreakable smiles.

lean frames.

polo shirts gripping some young

boys soon to be walking tight rope

without poles.

    it’s there, all of it.

    ice cold michelob.

    melon holy like water.

    rattlesnakes.

    we couldn’t juggle balls.

    didn’t know any gangsters.

we were capable boys,

all i’ve got is this picture.

About the Poet:

Washington D.C.'s Brian Gilmore is a poet, writer, and public interest lawyer. He currently teaches at the Michigan State University College of Law. He is the author of two collections of poetry: "elvis presley is alive and well and living in harlem," and "Jungle Nights and Soda Fountain Rags: poem for Duke Ellington." His poetry, essays, and reviews have been widely published in newspapers, magazines and journals; his honors include - Individual Artist Award - Maryland State Arts Council - 2001, and 2003, Pushcart Prize nominee 2007, Willow Books Award nominee (fiction) - 2013. He is also a regular columnist with the Progressive Media Project where he writes about politics, law, and culture. His blog is the chocolate city review.

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.

The Sound of Sugar....Randall R. Freisinger

Alien Sex

I stood on the porch that night,
the lights from a parent’s car just vanishing
at the end of the street. My friend and I
had been to a movie, It Came From
Outer Space. Above me, the stars
had lost their innocence. My block

throbbed with threats from distant galaxies.
Because I was late, I entered the house
quietly, hoping to sneak unnoticed upstairs.
All seemed normal enough for the usual
Saturday night of too much drinking—
My parents, asleep, he in his chair

in front of the guttering television screen,
she splayed out on the studio couch
in a nearby room. How quickly
the known world can turn strange.
I knew what it was when I saw it
on the living room floor. I had swiped

them from Crown Drugs and filled them
with water to ambush passing cars. This one,
viscous, lay damply coiled on the rug
like the sloughed husk of a newborn alien
that must have streaked from deepest space
even as my friend and I hunkered down

in the Southtown Theater’s three-dimensional
darkness. My brain, agitated,
could come to only two conclusions,
one so fantastic my mind refused
the gross picture it posed. The only credible
way to explain it: Extraterrestrials.

Either way, I had no choice but to destroy
the evidence, picking the sticky chrysalis
skin up with a thick wad of Kleenex
and shoving it deep in the kitchen trash
right alongside my own astonishment.
Upstairs, I tried hard to distract myself

with prayer, but that wet rubber
crackled in my mind’s air like static
and there was no getting through
that night to the starry kingdom of God.
Next morning at breakfast, I studied them

carefully through my new 3-D glasses,
my father in profile with his coffee
and Sunday paper, Mother a bit
groggy at the stove, tending
pans of bacon and eggs. Nothing
amiss: no telltale scales on his hands,
no saw-toothed tail switching beneath

her gossamer robe. All through breakfast
I stayed vigilant, my eyes as sharp
as Flash Gordon’s, my mind hyper
with the ammo of fight or flight.
After breakfast I planned to search
in our backyard for the crater, the mother ship

I knew it would contain.
I would bravely destroy the invaders.
Then it would be my most solemn duty
to inform the world: From now on
here, on Planet Earth, things would never,
ever again be the same.






About the Poet:

Randall R. Freisinger's poems have appeared in numerous literary magazines and anthologies and have been nominated for five Pushcart Prizes. He has four collections of poems: Running Patterns (1985 Flume Press National Chapbook Competition winner), Hand Shadows  (Green Tower Press, 1988), Plato’s Breath (May Swenson Poetry Prize, Utah State University Press, 1997), and Nostalgia’s Thread: Ten Poems on Norman Rockwell Paintings  (Hol Art Books, 2009).   

He was born and raised in Kansas City, Missouri, and educated at the University of Missouri-Columbia.  Since 1977 he has lived in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, where he is Emeritus Professor of Rhetoric, Literature, and Creative Writing in the Department of Humanities at Michigan Technological University.


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.

The Sound of Sugar....Joy Gaines-Friedler

Returns

It’s coming upon a year my friend sat
         Lotus style
in her Hospice bed, said, it’s all so terrible

and, now I know love.
And, my neighbor called to say his wife
        is leaving him.

I admit slugging through with only
a feathery slip of a word—
sorry.

Lately a kind of dividend is paid
when nothing changes overnight

when the phone remains silent
and no conduit of news diminishes us.

That exoskeleton that can grow around me
    keeping sweetness out?
I’m sorry for that too.

When my friend, thin as a wing,
looked at me and said,
this must be so hard on you,

I shook-off that boney layer.

I let that be her last gift to me.

My neighbor keeps everything clean,
    fixes everything;
has dropped his wife’s name; turned her into a pronoun.

She’s living with someone else,
he says without my asking.

Every morning a chickadee flings itself
against the window—fighting its reflection—
defending against itself.

Today, at the mail box, my neighbor said,
she’s not coming back.





About the Poet:

Joy Gaines-Friedler’s work is widely published in journals, including Rattle, Margie, The New York Quarterly, and others. Her first full-length book of poetry, Like Vapor, was published by Mayapple Press (2008). Joy teaches creative writing for non-profits in the Detroit area including Springfed Arts and Common Ground where she works with families of victims of homicide.




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.

The Sound of Sugar....Andrew C. Gottlieb

Ritual Leavings


We went to your stone and waited.
      The snow showed our past,
             gave us away in our giving.

Block letters, bright sun, frozen grass.
     Winter was listening
           while we lined our things

along the short granite cliff.
     Three chocolates in lockstep,
          a latte, a small happy Buddha,

the three dollar kind in red plastic
     with his bag and his look.
          A small book of poems.

The only thing missing: the photos,
     your smiling. This losing
           dismantles our notions of wholeness:

cold fingers, a frivolous mingling,
     a single crow hunched in an oak.
        Who’s not lonely in the cold?

The trees have retreated excepting the firs
      with their green skirts and thin leaves.
           Needles, the decline, goodbyes, pine

scent. You’ve left us behind
     to a ritual leaving. A comb,
         a coin, an orchid, bone whistles.

A milling of beliefs at the coldest
      of stone, our clinging past
            like a piling, a raft, and a rope.






About the Poet:

Andrew C. Gottlieb works and writes in Irvine, California, and loves the southwest climate, though he spent 9 years in Seattle and misses the rain and ferries. His work is published in many
journals and in his chapbook, Halflives (New Michigan Press, 2005). These poems are from Ritual Leavings, a recent semi-finalist for the Philip Levine Award. Andrew does a pretty good job at his day gig, but avoids it as much as possible; instead spending time outdoors with his wife and two stepchildren, or with his books: reading and writing.   



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.

The Sound of Sugar....Rio Cortez

                          SALT LAKE

This is the place!                    Space is the place.

-Brigham Young                      -Sun Ra



I slip the silksac of my body    & walk out     onto the flats
the air a machine      sucking earth into fragments of white    absorbing heat 
      finding me    starting to burn


I kneel at the shore      I reach into the lake     it is red   as a cut    
      I reach into the wound of it     I drag out    its string of black   
bones     and now I am two     times the dark  


I crush skeletons    of artemia underfoot   I eat eggs    in stasis the dead    lake idles
the city       surrounds    what weapons we are    I fold the net  of my shadow   I keep it
   as evidence





About the Poet:

Rio Cortez has received fellowships from Cave Canem & Canto Mundo Foundations. She was a recipient of the Sarah Lawrence College Lucy Grealy Prize in Poetry and the 2012 Poets & Writers Amy Award. She is a graduate of the MFA program at New York University & co-founder of the Good Times Collective. Her work has appeared in Clementine, Tuesday, Tidal Basin, Sugar House Review, Cratelit & Saul Williams' Chorus. Born & raised in Salt Lake City, she now loves & lives in Queens, NY.


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.

Sermons and Lectures Both Blank and Relentless by Matt Hart
(Typecast Publishing, 2012) 


reviewed by Adam Love

    I raise my Black Flag to declare my dis-allegiance
    Always do the opposite of anything I tell you
    I’ll do it too    Whatever you say

Matt Hart’s newest collection, Sermons and Lectures Both Blank and Relentless, is chock-full of opposites and a love/hate relationship for opposites. At times both Taoistic and sagacious, dark and brooding, the collection is honest and open—always in love with itself and its many worlds. It’s essentially a book that has been waiting to be written for the longest/shortest time. It attempts to re-define the entire human experience, or perhaps to reconnect with it, in the digital age: in this very time that defines us:

    How to grow and grow along without turning
    into a devil/red giant     Or if one must, how also to be
    a sequoia     One thing’s certain: I won’t do it typing
    The sun a sort of burning white hole in my pocket
    Better to spend life spending one’s life, shouting
    and rocketing, blasting the igloo

Hart argues that it’s “impossible to say anything for sure,” that all men are mortal—it’s as if his speaker is trying to tell its readers how short the human life can be. But one thing that nearly seems infinite is the idea that technology, and our use of it, will likely outlast us. However, it’s not necessarily something Hart seems to be confident in—and treats it more as a curse: “I wake up typing letters / Alphabet, alphabet—thought not to anyone in particular / To the circus     To Fluoride     Beelzebub or Beelzebubba.”

As a front-man of the punk band TRAVEL (the book is available with a full album by Hart’s band, with Hart himself shouting each poem over a discordant and harmonic wail of guitar and drum), the speaker throughout Hart’s book constantly references its own punk roots. Artists like Patti Smith and Alice Cooper, among others, are often conjured or quoted directly: “Buried / in the forest by seven singing dwarves, still waiting for a kiss / from The Slits or Patti Smith    But ‘When we die we go / to recess’ is the end, that’s it    Which seems perfect.”  And each of the five poems of the book surmount as a kind of private concert for the reader, where he/she may find themselves in the relentless urgency of their own moshpit on the page.

The book is perhaps best experienced in its entirety, as a cohesive piece, like an album. The collection is woven from the ashes of burnt vinyls and fistfuls of postmodern algorithms. What makes this such a stand out, fiery bundle of poetry is the substance between the quirks and tics of a neurotic and self-afflicted speaker, who might have more in common with contemporary language and the inner world, than most voices could strive for.

    Walking home drunk the other night, I said a bunch of weird, good things
    and you did, too and while it’s hard to remember exactly what,
    the shadows of what and the feelings still linger—even now,
    even sober—we were so fired up, because
    the night was so ridiculously in flower, so and so and me and you

    electrified and shocking, terrific and true, and we were laughing together,
    leaving our strung out presence like presents around the city,
    me an amplifier and you a defender.
  
The heart of the book seems to be the third poem, “Amplifier to Defender,” from which the above excerpt is taken, where the speaker suddenly jolts into a strikingly different tone separate from the punk-driven, near non-sequitor declarative sentences and brooding musings throughout the sections titled “Lamplighter” and “Sermons and Lectures.” Hart invites the speaker into a private arena, as if “Amplifier to Defender” were really a letter written to a lover and left on a kitchen counter. After realizing its clear and direct command, the poet merely diced it up with line breaks:
  
    Just back from running—it seems I am always writing to you
    when I’m just back from running, but that’s what happens:
    My mind in motion works better in motion, or maybe it only works
    more furiously. Or happily, clearly, seriously. My plan is to make a few notes

    on who we are/what we might be.
  
It is in this poem where Hart might be at his most poignant with lines like “As Matthew Rohrer / put it, / ‘I must learn to say the things I never intended to say,’ and then / I want to add: I also want to learn to say all the things I intended to say— / intended and unintended in the very same breath.” A dualistic view on both poetry and the act of creating poetry; vision and near desperation, as conflicted and complicated as a Jack Myers poem; verse that conjures up an almost William Carlos Williamsian sentiment that is completely devoid of sentimentality.

The syntax of the book alters between use of white space and non-sequitur lines; the speaker seems to remain keenly in tune with the trials and tribulations of a postmodern world, both in the literary and worldly sense, through the duration of the collection. It’s as if the speaker present throughout the entire collection treats the notion of postmodernism and its uncertainties—at some times absurdness—as a metaphor for the human condition he is perplexed by and obsessed with: “To live we keep living     Some minutes / The instructions     You read and you weep / Or you act and then curtain      I can’t stand / the suffering, so give ‘em enough rope, / then occupy my life with anthemic meander.” At times comical and nearly acrid, the final poem, “Blood Brothers, Weird Sisters,” seems to do exactly what the speaker is obsessed with: dis/re-connecting the human life to its own vague, infinite temporality. The speaker becomes a proselyte who doesn’t proselytize:
  
    At the root of human being
    is a dot disconnected, wishing to be connected in earnest
    to a mission, a set of instructions, a deep inflated thing,
    hissing and red with a nozzle and a label.
    You’re a rabbit painted sunset, so I speak of you fondly
    to anyone and everyone who will listen to the music.
    And whoever won’t listen will also have to listen,
    you can bet I’ll keep singing/find a way.

It’s easy to assume, while listening to the album version of Sermons and Lectures, that Hart might be referring to himself as the punk rock poet he is. The collection, in and of itself, is a grungy album in a dank basement of some shitty bar where kids with half-greased Mohawks sip PBR under the cold blue glow of a LaBatt sign. And this is where all the meaning is: the voice throughout Sermons and Lectures is a voice that will consistently keep singing and find a way to make its readers listen as well. Perhaps what’s most interesting is how the untraditional line breaks and use of white space mirror the untraditional music that classically defines punk rock—rhythm and discordance: “Nature awaits us, / and Nature’s got fire     I’ve been cool for too many / summers     Temperature is rising     Joe Strummer.”

Sermons and Lectures both Blank and Relentless is a book that will leave its readers both satiated and dissatisfied, as each reader will be moved by Hart’s darkly tender observations—at times to the point where they might feel as if they’re staring into a mirror and simultaneously frustrated that they will never be able to write poems the way Matt Hart does. Perhaps most importantly, it’s a book of poems the reader will want to return to again and again, constantly finding new meanings—as any good collection of verse (or album) should do.

Because, as Hart tells us,

    Nothing is perfectly nailed to the wall.
    I want as much as possible for the carnival of what is. Better worn out
    and wary, than a mannequin pretending. “The slightest loss of attention
    leads to death,” said Frank O’Hara. I say: “Be prepared for the darkness

    when it takes you, but stay alive and stay light
    for as long as you can.”

Shaking the Kaleidoscope by Kate Kingston
(Lost Horse Press, 2012) 


reviewed by Nancy Takacs

Kate Kingston weaves culture, language, and myth from Spain and Mexico, throughout her first book, Shaking the Kaleidoscope, in surprising ways, engaging the reader with images from her travels there, as well as from her childhood in Wisconsin and her adult life in the American west. Balancing her desire for humanity and beauty against a world of loss and violence, she observes with a level eye, and reconciles this looking at the world dead on, sometimes with humor, but always with verve.

The book begins with poems about Lorca. Kingston travels widely in Spain, was a Spanish professor, and is currently a poetry translator. Interspersed through her Lorca poems are sections of the title poem, which include memories of an accident when she fell as a child as well as one in which her son almost died. The voice throughout the five parts of this poem cannot suppress her memories of violence:

          I cannot recall violence […]
    I cannot recall pistachios,
    the way the shell cracks between my teeth,
    or myself dropping
    from a metal
    bar chipping my front
    tooth on happiness,
    the stain of blood in the sand,
    nothing like the matador
    gored in the groin,
    so that my lament rises
    up next to Lorca
    and smells of wet ashes.

The sections of the poem build with the thread of violent events we might witness in our everyday lives, such as a refusal to someone begging, and the near-death of a loved one in the powerful,“Shaking the Kaleidoscope III,” a piece about her young son’s near-asphyxiation, and the distance and paralysis felt when one force clashes violently against another:

          I cannot recall violence,
    but one morning my son’s face
    turned blue. I forced
    my own breath into his lungs,
    cannot recall the sound of waves
    claiming shore or the way
    his feet toed-in, only the cadence
    of silence, nothing like
    the chain of mountain peaks
    suffering from lack of rain.
           I cannot recall the way a knife
    slices coconut into quarter moon
    wedges, cannot recall cleats
    biting into cobblestone, nor the bull
    lifting his horns to the groin,
    the matador spilling onto sand,
    nothing like the pomegranate
    or the blue face of a child
    when his lungs will not pull air,
    nothing like exhaust filling
    my nostrils or pesetas
    dropping into an open palm.

The pulse of the five-section poem is violence, and it is unforgettable. This underscores her compassion for Lorca, his poetry, his perseverance in facing, and not fleeing from, possible assassination.

“What Does Lorca Own?,” placed in his summer home Huerta de San Vicente in Grenada, Spain, also shows Kingston’s connection with him as a writer, in the following lines:

    Lorca owns a room full of assonance placating
    his pen with ohs and ahs. He begins to float,
    and the room becomes a river, current and undertow…
  
    …Twenty-six boots cross
    the plaza, worn-down heels bring him men
    filled with bullets and lime. When he closes his eyes:

    he sees the stray dog approach his knee, the stray
    dog sniff his crotch, the stray dog lick his face…      
    Lorca owns the word Green.
 
The poet discovers meaning for herself in both Spanish and English, in her interaction with the tangible, learning what is symbolic in one culture could have a different meaning in another, although in her own poetic language, she intersects them both, creates anew. For example, the word “green” connotes death in the Spanish language, as opposed to new life in English. In several of her poems, she uses this word, allowing both meanings to surface, not choosing one over the other, because both languages are on her tongue and in her consciousness. Both meanings add to the context. She also searches in her comparisons for evidence of one world inside the other, cultures skipping boundaries.

As an example, although many of her images in the book point to a less anxious and more gentle Mexico, while visiting Mayan ruins she learns how women were killed or sacrificed, brutality against women evident in this culture, with “bruised skulls / found in the cenote,” how the “the women were struck, pushed, / over an edge into the sweet water / this underground river, and she leaves “clutching the cabled rail ready to steady [her] descent.” Kingston returns to snorkel this underground river in “Mayan Riviera Wedding” after her daughter’s wedding there, alone, to a cave where she pulls out a vigil candle that she lights as she feels fish surface, and watches bats fly around her: “murceilagos, struggle[ing] / with light, not unlike my daughter—her complicated veil, / its lace teeth catching on doorknobs, on coat hangers.” This re-visitation of the place where the women were killed suggests her need to mourn them, as well as to celebrate their lives, to both mourn and celebrate her daughter’s marriage. She begins “a new altar, / a piece of stalagmite.”

Kingston directs our attention to an American misunderstanding of art, another kind of violence. In the poem “Concourse A Exhibit,” an airport art exhibiting Denver was screened and critiqued as “inappropriate” because some of the artists’ works had images of skeletons; however, the poem suggests looking at art for art’s sake is what is important. Travelers are aware of what could happen on a plane and don’t have to be protected from a painting’s “eye socket of the skeleton staring back / as [they] clutch [their] boarding pass and identification in one hand, / [their]carry-on in the other”; or from the image of “bones / when the country is in code orange…”

Kingston writes of the world’s inconsistencies and tragedies, but also writes as strongly about joy. In “History of My Body” she celebrates:

    This body remembers trick-or-treat, its Snickers bars
    and bruised apples. This body remembers the way dried leaves
    scratch the skin when I somersault into the pile
    of tattooed veins—oak, elm, maple—then wrap myself
    in a sarong of silver water. Inside this body, flies buzz,
    this body with cake on its tongue.

In the final poem of Shaking the Kaleidoscope, “When Anna Meets for Lunch,” she intimates to a friend: “We are pearls born in the clam’s lust for sand. We are / coal before the diamond. What can pressure make of us now / taking us by the hand into the kaleidoscope of dark?”

Kingston’s poems embody duende, a term invented by Lorca who believed all good art must have it, saying: “The duende, then, is a power, not a work. It is a struggle, not a thought. I have heard an old maestro of the guitar say, ‘The duende is not in the throat; the duende climbs inside you, from the inside of the feet.’” Christopher Maurer, editor of In Duende, says, “The duende seizes not only the performer but also the audience

, creating conditions where art can be understood spontaneously with little, if any, conscious effort.” This is what Kate Kingston’s poetry does. With a forthright and fresh voice, dazzling imagery, and a conscience, it calls us home.