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. 

DANIEL ARIAS GOMEZ, "FORTUNE COOKIE" (ISSUE 14)

FORTUNE COOKIE

You pick up the cookie and crack
it open. You spread the paper with your fingers
and read—Happiness begins
when you face life with a wink and a smile.
You snort and throw it away. And you wish
that just once you’d get a shitty fortune.
You wish the cookie would say that your father
will spend the next ten months in the hospital
with a plastic shunt sticking out of his skull
to drain fluid from his swollen brain
until he finally dies—you wish it’d say
that by the end, your father won’t even recognize
you, that he’ll be rambling about chickens
and horses, believing that he’s still in his ranch
in Mexico, that he’ll say he likes the pozole
when he’s eating a tuna sandwich you bought
for him in the cafeteria—you wish it’d say
that in his last moments of lucidity he will look
you straight in the eye, and he will tell you he’s sorry
for having been such a horrible father,
that you’ll answer that it’s okay, that you forgive
him—you wish the cookie would say
that when your father finally dies, it’ll hurt
more than anything has ever hurt
in your life, but that every year after his
death you’ll buy one of those cloying tres leches
cakes that he loved so much, and as you eat
it next to his ashes you’ll remember his calloused
hands cutting up the beef for the pozole
that he used to cook on Sundays after church,
and you’ll smile.

ABOUT THE POET

Daniel E. Arias-Gomez was born and raised in Guadalajara. He is currently a poetry student in the MFA program at CSU Fresno.

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.